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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads. 145
sauce with grated Parmesan, breadcrumbed and browned. They may also be called au Parmesan.
Chouxfleurs sauce au beurre are served with butter sauce; à la sauce-with white sauce. à la Reine-served in a rich white sauce with chopped ham. à la Piémontaise-served in a white sauce with grated cheese.
Pieces of cauliflower, masked with white sauce, dipped in batter and fried, are called Marinade de chouxfleurs.
Soufflé de chouxfleurs à la Baronne is composed of pieces of cauliflower in layers with slices of raw tomato, covered with cheese soufflé mixture, and baked.
CELERY.
Céleri au jus is stewed in stock. à la moëlle is stewed, and served on toast with brown sauce and beef marrow. à la crème-stewed, and served in a white sauce with cream. à l'Espagnole stewed, and served in Espagnole sauce. à la Chetwynd-stewed with onions, and served on toast with the onions, and Béchamel sauce with cream, etc. à la Génevoise-stewed, covered with white sauce, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and grated cheese, and browned.
Céleri à la Villeroi-masked with Allemande sauce, breadcrumbed and fried.
Beignets de céleri are fritters of celery fried in batter. They are sometimes served with tomato sauce.
Celery roots are served with butter sauce as Céleri-rave à la sauce au beurre; stewed and served au jus; or glazed à la demi glace. They are also dressed as a Purée de céleri-rave.
CHESTNUTS.
Though properly a fruit, a purée of chestnuts cooked with stock and wine may be served as a egetable, and called Purée de marrons.
They are also dressed as a soufflé.
CUCUMBER.
Slices of cucumber cooked with cream, butter and flour are called Concombres à la crème.
Concombres à la poulette-cut in pieces, and cooked with butter and sugar; served in white sauce with cream, chopped parsley, etc. farcies à la crème the centres scooped out, they are stuffed and stewed; served in Béchamel sauce with cream and sugar. à l'Espagnole-cut in short lengths, stuffed, stewed, and served with brown sauce. Served in white sauce with grated cheese, they are à l'Italienne. à la moëlle the stuffing is made of breadcrumbs, beef marrow, etc.; they are served with a brown sauce.
The tail of the cauliflower entries, then celery, chestnuts and cucumber. The cucumber section is the one that most needs translating, because nothing in it is raw.
- Cucumber was a cooked vegetableEvery cucumber entry here is stewed, stuffed or sauced. There is no raw cucumber on the page at all. Cooked gently it goes soft and faintly melon-like and carries a sauce well, and these dishes are not curiosities but the ordinary way the vegetable was served hot.
- Sugar with the cucumberTwo entries put sugar in with the butter, and one puts it into the Béchamel. It reads as a misprint and it is not. Cucumber turns bitter towards the skin, and the sugar is seasoning against that, the way a pinch of it still works in a tomato sauce.
- Céleri-rave is celeriacThe page calls it celery root and gives it butter sauce, stock, or a light glaze. It is the vegetable now sold as celeriac, and the book is right to treat it as a separate item rather than the root of the celery above it: they are different cultivars grown for different parts.
- Celery was braisedWhole heads stewed in stock until tender and served hot, often on toast, with anything from cream to Espagnole over them. Braised celery is the most reproducible dish on the page and the one a modern cook can follow almost exactly, because the method is only stock, time and a sauce.
- Marinade is two different thingsElsewhere in the book, marinade means a soak in oil and vinegar before cooking. Here, Marinade de chouxfleurs is cauliflower masked in white sauce, dipped in batter and fried, with no soaking at all. The same word is doing two unrelated jobs, which is a trap when reading from an index.
- The chestnut argumentThe page says that chestnuts are properly a fruit, but that a purée of them cooked with stock and wine may be served as a vegetable. It is a small argument the book is having with itself, and it is worth noticing: the chapters were slots a hostess had to fill, and a cook would bend the botany to fill one.
Vegetables came to this table as separate dressed dishes with their own names and their own sauces, not heaped beside the meat, and that single fact explains the length of the chapter. A cauliflower earns six treatments because it had to be able to appear as a dish. Look at what the sauces are: Parmesan, Béchamel, Allemande, Espagnole, Villeroi, Soufflé. The vegetables were being put through exactly the same repertoire as the meat, by the same cook, in the same hours of the same afternoon, which doubles the work of every dinner. None of these preparations is faster than boiling the vegetable and none of them keeps better. What the sauce buys is the appearance of a dish, and a household that served a dinner out of this book was paying, above everything else, for hands.