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Peas and Celery
1 pint canned or cooked peas 3 cups raw cut celery 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup water 1 teaspoon salt Cook celery in sufficient boiling water to cover until tender, which will require about forty-five minutes. Drain off the liquid, and measure out one cup. Rub the flour and butter together; add a little at a time the water in which the celery was cooked. When all is added, boil five minutes. Add the cooked celery and peas.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish from the wartime meatless-cookery tradition. Only one instruction really needs rethinking.
- Cut the celery timeForty-five minutes of boiling reduces celery to a stringy grey pulp. Cut stalks into half-inch pieces and simmer 10-15 minutes, until a knife goes in with slight resistance. The long time may reflect older, stringier celery varieties rather than the pascal celery now sold, though the recipe gives no reason.
- A pint of peasOne pint is 2 cups, which is nearer two 15-oz cans drained, or one larger can, than a single 15-oz can. Frozen peas work better than canned and need only to be warmed through in the finished sauce, not cooked.
- The sauce is a raw rouxButter and flour rubbed together cold and then thinned with hot liquid is essentially an uncooked roux, close to the beurre-manié idea. Add the hot celery water very gradually and whisk hard or it will lump; the five-minute boil cooks out the raw flour taste and should not be skipped.
- Save the cooking liquidThe single cup of celery water is the whole flavour of the sauce. If the celery gives up less than a cup, top up with milk or a light stock rather than plain water.
- SaltA full teaspoon for this quantity is generous by modern taste, especially with canned peas, which are already salted. Add half, then taste at the end.
- YieldServes four as a side, or two or three as a light main. A grating of nutmeg or black pepper is period-appropriate and improves it considerably.
Meat conservation was a matter of public campaign rather than personal preference in the English-speaking world around the First World War, and cookery of the period leaned on dishes substantial enough to anchor a plate. This dish substitutes bulk rather than protein, with the butter-and-flour sauce supplying the richness that a piece of meat would otherwise have given. Creamed vegetables in white sauce were the workhorse of that argument, since a cup of thickened liquid could make almost any boiled vegetable read as a dinner course. Celery in this period was often blanched and earthed up in the garden, and older varieties were stringier and slower-cooking than the pascal celery that came to dominate later in the century, which is the likeliest explanation for the forty-five minutes.