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Celery Au Gratin
4 heads of celery, white part only 2 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese 1 pint milk 1 tablespoon flour 1 tablespoon butter Pepper and salt to taste Cook the celery in the milk for half an hour, salt, and then drain and cut in three-inch lengths; make a sauce with the flour, butter, and the milk the celery was boiled in, and then add the cheese; mix well, butter a baking dish, put in a layer of celery and then a layer of sauce till the dish is full. Sprinkle bread crumbs on the top, and add bits of butter. Put in the oven to brown. Cook about half an hour.
A simple braise-and-bake that depends on one thing: the milk the celery cooked in becomes the sauce, so nothing is wasted and the celery flavour carries through. A few of the proportions need attention before you start.
- "4 heads of celery, white part only"A head means a whole bunch, not a stalk. Modern celery is bred larger and greener than the blanched celery of the period, so two to three bunches, trimmed of leaves and the dark outer ribs, will give roughly the same volume of tender white heart.
- The sauce is under-thickenedOne tablespoon each of flour and butter will not bind a pint of milk, and the milk will have reduced further during the half-hour simmer. Two tablespoons of each gives a sauce that coats rather than pools; use whatever cooking milk remains and top up with fresh if it has cooked down below a cup.
- Cook the celery gentlyMilk scorches on a bare pan bottom. Keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered or barely covered, and stir occasionally. Half an hour will leave the ribs quite soft, which is the point here — this is not a crisp-tender vegetable dish.
- Oven temperatureThe original only says "put in the oven to brown." Set it at 375–400F. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so the half-hour bake is about heating through and colouring the crumbs.
- Parmesan quantityTwo tablespoons across a pint of sauce is very restrained by current taste. A half-cup of grated Parmesan, or Parmesan plus a sharper cheese, gives a more assertive gratin, and the extra fat also helps the thin sauce.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, brown properly in half an hour. Tossing them with the melted butter before scattering gives even colour instead of scorched islands.
- YieldNo yield is given; four heads of celery will fill a dish for roughly four as a meatless main or six as a side. It wants a wide shallow dish rather than a deep one so the layers heat evenly.
Celery in this period was still something of a luxury vegetable, sold blanched and packed upright in tall glasses on the dinner table as a raw relish, though stewed, braised and sauced celery had long been familiar in English and American kitchens. Cooking it in milk and finishing it with cheese follows the standard French gratin logic applied to whatever vegetable the household had, and the technique of reusing the cooking liquid as the sauce base is characteristic of thrifty American and English cookery of the era. Cookbooks devoted to meatless eating multiplied in the years around the First World War, driven variously by food conservation campaigns, vegetarian conviction and Lenten observance, and their authors leaned heavily on milk, cheese and eggs to supply the substance that meat had provided.