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Cream of Celery Soup No. 2
8 stalks celery 2 cups boiling water Salt, pepper 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 3 cups milk Wash, and scrape the celery, and cut into small pieces, add the water, and cook until very tender. Renew the water if it boils away. Mash the celery in the water in which it was cooked.
Scald the milk. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, and pour in slowly the scalded milk. Cook thoroughly, stirring constantly. Mix this sauce with the celery, season to taste; strain, and serve immediately with croutons.
A plain white-sauce soup that depends entirely on how thoroughly the celery is cooked and how well the roux is handled. Two details in the original need translating.
- "8 stalks celery"In American cookbooks of this period "stalk" usually means a single rib rather than a whole head, which here would be something like half a bunch. Read as eight heads it would produce far more soup than the three cups of milk can account for.
- Scrape, not peelScraping means running a paring knife down the outer curve of the rib to lift the tough strings. Celery grown today is generally less fibrous than the blanched winter celery these older books assumed, so a vegetable peeler over the outer ribs is enough; the inner ribs need nothing.
- Cook until very tenderThis is the hinge. Celery holds its fibre stubbornly, and undercooked pieces will not mash or strain properly, leaving a thin, watery soup with pulp left in the sieve. Give it 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer, topping up the water as directed.
- The rouxOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to three cups of milk is a very thin binding — the soup is meant to be pourable, not a chowder. Cook the flour and butter together a minute before adding milk, and add the hot milk in a slow stream while whisking to avoid lumps.
- Scalding the milkBring it just to the point where bubbles form at the edge, around 180F, and no further. Warm milk goes into the roux more readily and shortens the cooking; the recipe's own instruction to pour it in slowly while stirring constantly is what actually guards against lumps.
- StrainingPush the celery and its cooking liquid through a sieve with the back of a ladle before combining, or blend and then strain. A stick blender does in thirty seconds what the original expects of a masher and a wire sieve.
- SeasoningCelery cooked this long turns sweet and faintly bitter and needs more salt than you expect, plus white pepper if you want to keep the soup pale. A grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate and flatters the milk.
- YieldSomething over four cups once strained, serving three or four as a first course. Serve at once -- the thin roux will not hold the soup together indefinitely, and reheating tends to give it a skin and a scorched note.
Cream of celery belongs to the family of milk-thickened purée soups that filled the opening pages of American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, built on the same butter-flour-milk sauce that served for creamed vegetables, croquettes and chafing-dish suppers. Celery itself was a comparative luxury in the nineteenth century, grown blanched in trenches and often served raw in tall glass vases as a display dish at the table. The recipe calls only for the celery to be washed, scraped and cut, and finished with croutons.