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Cheese (Tablespoonfuls at a time Dr)
tablespoonfuls at a time. Dr. Stacey Jones advises Celery-tea, hot and strong (with cream and sugar, if desired), to be drunk by the teacupful three or four times in the day, so as to abate neuralgia, and even sciatica, which it sometimes will do very speedily; likewise sick headaches. For ordinary stewed Celery as a vegetable dish, cut five or six sticks of Celery into lengths, each about four inches, and stew these in some good brown stock until tender; take out the Celery, and reduce the stock to half the quantity: thicken with a little butter and flour : add pepper and salt: then pour this over the Celery, and serve on a square of toast, very hot. For making Celery water, allow a large head for each quart of water. Cook this when washed, and cut up, until the water is reduced to a pint : then strain, and give a wineglassful two or three times in the day. It is best taken on an empty stomach.
The page runs three things together: a medicinal celery tea, a proper vegetable side dish, and a strained celery water dosed by the wineglass. Only the middle one is cooking, and it works as written once the vessels and quantities are pinned down.
- The hinge: reduce the stock, then thickenThe dish lives or dies on the sauce. Stew the celery in stock that just covers it, lift the celery out while it is barely tender, then boil the liquid down by half before thickening. Thickening first gives a pallid, floury sauce that tastes of nothing.
- How much celeryFive or six sticks cut in four-inch lengths is roughly one head, and serves two as a side. Take the outer ribs, string them with a peeler, and keep the pale heart for salad. The recipe calls for no preliminary blanching, and none is needed.
- Good brown stockBeef or veal stock, reduced and unsalted. A tin of consomme or a low-sodium beef broth will do; season only after the reduction, since halving the volume doubles the salt.
- Butter and flourEqual weights kneaded cold into a paste, about 15 g of each for a cup of reduced stock, whisked in a lump at a time and simmered two minutes to cook out the raw flour. Cooking time for the celery itself is 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer.
- A wineglassfulIn household books of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz; a teacupful is less fixed, somewhere in the range of 4 to 6 fl oz. A quart reduced to a pint is roughly a litre down to half a litre.
- The tea and the celery waterBoth are simply celery simmered in water and strained, and neither will abate neuralgia or sciatica. Treat them as a light savoury broth if you like the flavour, and nothing more. Anyone taking warfarin or diuretics should note that very concentrated vegetable decoctions were not written with drug interactions in mind.
- ServingThe toast is structural as much as traditional: it absorbs the sauce that runs off the celery. Use a thick square of good bread, dried out in the oven rather than lightly toasted, or it collapses.
Celery earned its place in a book like this because of what it was before it was a salad vegetable. Wild celery, smallage, was grown as a medicinal and flavouring herb long before gardeners bred out its bitterness, a development often traced to Italian and French kitchen gardens of the seventeenth century, and the seed retained a reputation as a remedy for rheumatism, gout and nerve pain that persisted through Victorian domestic medicine. That reputation is traditional rather than demonstrated, but it explains why a doctor's advice on celery tea sits in the same paragraph as a recipe for stewing the stalks in brown stock. Meals Medicinal, published in 1905, belongs to an older genre that treated the kitchen as an adjunct to the dispensary, offering each foodstuff twice over: once as a dish, once as a dose. The stewed celery on toast, meanwhile, is straightforwardly of its time, a vegetable served with meat stock and a butter-and-flour sauce.