Celery Soup
1 head of celery 1/2 ounce chopped onion 1 pint milk 1/2 ounce of butter 1 pint boiling water 1/2 ounce flour Cut the celery into small pieces, and cook it for five minutes in the butter with the onion. Add the water, and boil until the celery is tender. Rub through a hairsieve. Mix the flour smoothly with a little of the milk, add the rest of the milk to the celery, and boil. Stir in the flour and cook for ten minutes. Season, and serve.
A plain white celery soup of the sort that filled the first pages of vegetarian cookbooks a century ago. The technique is sound; only the units and the sieve need translating.
- A head of celeryThe whole bunch, not a single rib — roughly 1 to 1.5 lb trimmed. Save the pale inner leaves and add them with the stalks; they carry more celery flavour than the ribs do.
- The small weightsHalf an ounce of butter is 1 tablespoon, half an ounce of flour is a scant 2 tablespoons, and half an ounce of chopped onion is about 1 to 1½ tablespoons — a very small amount, meant to season rather than to build a base. Doubling the onion will not hurt anything.
- PintsIf the book is following British measure a pint is 20 fl oz; American measure gives 16. Either works here, but a US pint each of water and milk makes a thicker soup, and the two together yield about 4 cups, or three to four servings.
- Rub through a hairsieveA horsehair sieve was the standard tool for purées, and is usually said to have been preferred because hair, unlike tinned wire, did not taint or discolour acidic food. A blender or food mill does the same job faster, but pass the purée through a fine strainer afterwards regardless — celery strings survive a blender and ruin the texture.
- Where it can go wrongAdd the milk to the celery purée off the heat and bring it up gently. Boiled hard against a starch-thin base, milk catches on the bottom of the pan and scorches the whole pot.
- The ten minutesThat is not arbitrary. Flour stirred in raw tastes of paste; ten minutes at a bare simmer, stirring, cooks it out and lets the soup thicken properly.
- SeasonThe original leaves this open, as period recipes usually do. Salt generously, white pepper rather than black if you want to keep the soup pale, and a scrape of nutmeg is common with milk-thickened vegetable soups.
Cream of celery belongs to the family of milk-thickened vegetable pur hat chapters from the middle of the nineteenth century onward — the same formula, with the vegetable swapped, produces artichoke, turnip or green pea soup. Without stock, a cook needed something to give body and richness, and a butter-flour-milk base did that at very little cost. Celery itself was a fashionable vegetable in this period, presented at table in tall glass celery vases and eaten raw as a relish; soup was the sensible use for the coarse outer ribs and leaves that nobody wanted to crunch on. The hair sieve named in the method was standard equipment in any kitchen that made pur es, and its disappearance is a fair marker of how much the domestic blender changed this kind of cooking.