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Celery and Cheese
2 cups of celery cut in 1/2-inch pieces 1 bay leaf 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup Parmesan cheese 1 cup of buttered crumbs 1 pint of cream or milk Salt and pepper Cook the celery in the milk for half an hour, then drain. Make a sauce with the flour, butter, the milk the celery was boiled in, the bay leaf and the seasoning. When well cooked remove the bay leaf and add the cheese. Put into a buttered baking dish the boiled celery, then cover well with the sauce, sprinkle over the buttered crumbs, and set in the oven to brown.
A straightforward gratin, but the proportions in the original assume a cook who will adjust by eye. Two things need attention: the sauce is badly under-thickened as written, and the celery is cooked far longer than it needs.
- Cook the celery lessHalf an hour in simmering milk reduces half-inch celery to string and pulp. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer leaves it tender with some bite, and the milk still picks up the flavour you want for the sauce.
- Watch the milkMilk scorches on a direct flame and can look grainy when simmered hard with vegetables. Keep it below a simmer and stir now and then; if you have a heavy-bottomed pan, use it.
- The sauce is too thinOne tablespoon each of flour and butter will not thicken a pint of liquid into anything that clings. Use three tablespoons of each for a pint, cook the roux a minute or two before adding the hot milk, and simmer it until it coats a spoon.
- A pint and a cupA pint here is two cups. A cup of Parmesan means grated, roughly 3 oz — and it should go in off the heat, or the sauce turns oily and grainy.
- Buttered crumbsFresh or dried breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until evenly coated, about 2 tablespoons butter per cup of crumbs. They brown; unbuttered crumbs simply dry out.
- Salt lastParmesan and buttered crumbs both carry salt. Season the sauce lightly before the cheese goes in, then taste.
- Oven temperature"Set in the oven to brown" gives no temperature. The dish is already cooked, so it wants a hot oven and a short stay — bake until the top is coloured and the sauce bubbles at the edges. A slack oven will dry the crumbs before they take colour.
- YieldTwo cups of celery is a modest amount: two as a light main course with bread, or three to four as a side.
Books of meatless cookery multiplied in the English-speaking world from the late nineteenth century onward, driven by three quite different constituencies: Lenten and Friday abstinence in Catholic households, the vegetarian and food-reform movements, and — in the 1910s and again in the 1940s — government campaigns to stretch the meat ration. Cheese did the heavy lifting in all of them, and a chapter headed "Meat Substitutes" often turns out to be a chapter of cheese sauces, nut loaves and egg dishes. Celery itself was a more considered vegetable then than now: blanched by earthing up in the field, sold in tall glasses at the table, and thought worth cooking rather than merely crunching. Braised or creamed celery under a gratin crust seems to have been familiar enough in restaurants and households of the period.