Celery Sauce
2 cups chopped celery 2 cups water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 1 1/2 tablespoons flour Cook the celery in the water with the salt. When perfectly tender, and the water reduced about half, press it through a colander, add the milk, and reheat. Rub the butter and flour together, and pour over it a little of the hot milk and celery, stirring constantly. Then turn it into the hot liquid, and stir until thickened and thoroughly cooked.
All flour sauces should be of the consistency of rich cream. Thick, pasty sauces are unpalatable and indigestible.
A straightforward velouté-style vegetable sauce, thickened with a raw butter-flour paste rather than a cooked roux. The only real difficulty is the strainer.
- Reducing the celery waterTwo cups of water down to about one cup will take roughly 20-25 minutes at a steady simmer, depending on how small the celery is cut. Do not lid it tightly or nothing evaporates.
- "Press it through a colander"The aim is a purée, not drained celery. Use a food mill, a fine sieve with a wooden spoon, or blitz with a stick blender and then sieve to catch the strings.
- The butter-flour pasteThis is beurre manié, worked cold and raw, not a cooked roux. Tempering it with a little hot liquid before it goes into the pan is what keeps it from lumping, so do not skip that step.
- Cooking out the flourOnce thickened, keep it at a bare simmer another 3-4 minutes. Uncooked flour tastes of paste, which is precisely the fault the last line warns against.
- Consistency"Rich cream" means it coats a spoon and runs off freely. If it stiffens on standing, thin it with milk or more of the celery liquid.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt goes into the cooking water only; taste again at the end. White pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate and help, as celery alone is mild.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 cups, enough for four to six. It suits boiled or steamed vegetables, croquettes, poached eggs or boiled fowl, though the recipe itself names no accompaniment.
- Celery itselfCelery varieties have shifted, and much modern celery is milder and less stringy than older self-blanching sorts. Include some of the leaves and the pale inner ribs for flavour.
Celery sauce belongs to the large family of English and American white sauces built on milk and flour, useful because it makes plain boiled vegetables, eggs and grain croquettes taste like a course rather than a side. Cookery writing of this period often leaned on such sauces to carry meals without meat stock. The closing admonition against "thick, pasty sauces" echoes a common concern of the era's cookery writing, in which digestibility was treated as something close to a moral virtue and underdone flour was widely suspected of sitting heavily. Celery was in season from late summer through winter and stored well in a cool cellar.