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Cream of Celery Soup No. 1
1 1/2 cups diced celery 1 1/2 pints water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 pint white sauce Cook the diced celery in the salted water, until tender. The quantity of celery and liquid should equal one and 1/2 pints. To this mixture add one pint of white sauce, made as follows:--
A plain cream soup that trails off just where the white sauce recipe should begin. Everything else is straightforward, but a few of the quantities assume habits a modern cook no longer has.
- The missing white sauceThe sauce recipe is cut off, so its proportions can only be inferred. The thin white sauce usually specified for cream soups runs about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to each cup of milk, i.e. 2 tablespoons of each to the pint called for here; doubling the butter and flour gives a medium sauce and a considerably thicker soup.
- Pints and cupsA US pint is 2 cups, so 1 1/2 pints of water is 3 cups and 1 pint of white sauce is 2 cups. Since the cooked celery and liquid are brought back to 1 1/2 pints before the sauce is added, the finished soup comes to roughly 5 cups.
- Measure the liquid after cookingThe instruction that the celery and liquid together should equal 1 1/2 pints is the hinge of the recipe. Simmering uncovered will boil away more than you expect; top up with water, or the soup ends up thick and salty.
- Heat after combiningOnce the white sauce goes in, keep the pot below a boil; milk thickened with flour scorches readily.
- Smooth or chunkyThe original leaves the celery diced. A brief pass with an immersion blender, then a sieve to catch the strings, gives the velvety texture most cooks now expect from a cream soup.
- Use the whole headOuter stalks and leaves carry more flavour than the hearts. Simmer the leaves with the dice and lift them out before adding the sauce.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt seasons the cooking water only. Taste again after the milk goes in; white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are the period-appropriate finish.
Cream soups built on a flour-and-milk white sauce were a staple of early twentieth-century American cookery, and milk was widely promoted as a cheap protein by the domestic-science teaching of the day. Celery itself had shifted within living memory from a costly table luxury, served raw in tall glasses, to an everyday market vegetable, thanks largely to commercial growing on drained muck soils in Michigan and New York. The numbering of this recipe as "No. 1" suggests the collection carried more than one version of the soup.