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Creamed Celery on Toast
3 cups cut celery 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1/2 teaspoon salt Clean, scrape and cut enough celery to make three cups. Cook until tender in boiling, salted water, which will require about forty-five minutes. Let the water boil away when done, leaving the celery with very little liquid. Prepare a thin white sauce of the remaining ingredients, and pour over the celery. Prepare the toast by trimming the crust from thin slices of bread. Cut diagonally, making triangular-shaped pieces of toast. Toast in a moderate oven until crisp. Dip slices of crisp toast into some hot milk or cream. Serve with a spoonful of the creamed celery upon each slice.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish from the meatless-cookery tradition, where creamed vegetables on toast stood in for a meat course. Two things in the original need rethinking: the cooking time and the milk-dipped toast.
- Forty-five minutes is too longCelery cut into 1/2-inch pieces is tender in 10-15 minutes of simmering; 45 minutes reduces it to fibrous strings in a grey broth. Cook until a knife slides in with slight resistance, then drain rather than boiling dry, which risks scorching.
- Three cups of cut celeryThat is roughly three-quarters of a medium head, or about 10-12 oz trimmed. "Scrape" means pulling the coarse outer strings off the larger ribs with a paring knife or peeler, worth doing on the outside stalks.
- Thin white sauceOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a genuinely thin sauce, closer to a pouring cream than a coating one. If you want it to sit on toast rather than soak straight through, use 1 1/2 tablespoons of each.
- Cook the roux outLet the butter and flour bubble together a minute before the milk goes in, then simmer the finished sauce two or three minutes. Undercooked flour is the usual reason a dish like this tastes pasty.
- Moderate oven350F. Thin slices will crisp through in 10-15 minutes; turn them once. Oven-drying gives a drier, more brittle toast than a toaster, which is the point here.
- The milk dipDipping the crisp toast in hot milk or cream is a treatment that appears in other recipes of the period, softening it into something closer to a sop. It goes limp fast, so assemble and serve immediately, or skip the dip if you want the toast to stay crisp.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt in the sauce assumes the celery was salted in its cooking water. Taste before serving; celery and milk both want more pepper than the recipe suggests, and a grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- YieldServes two as a light main course or four as a side, with two triangles of toast each.
Creamed vegetables on toast were a mainstay of the meatless cookery books that proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published variously for Lenten observance, for vegetarian and Seventh-day Adventist households, and later for wartime and Depression-era economy. The formula rarely varied: a boiled vegetable, a thin white sauce, and a slice of bread doing the structural work that a chop or cutlet would otherwise have done. Celery in this era was a more prestigious vegetable than it is now, sold blanched and pale, served raw in tall cut-glass celery vases on holiday tables, and considered worth cooking as a dish in its own right rather than as a base for stock. The milk-dipped toast recalls the older English "sop," a treatment that appears in Victorian and Edwardian invalid cookery and nursery food, where softness was itself thought a virtue.