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Celery Au Gratin
1 1/2 cups diced celery 3 tablespoons chopped green pepper 1 cup water 1 cup cooked macaroni 1/2 cup grated cheese 1 tablespoon shortening 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup buttered bread crumbs Cook celery in salted water with the peppers. Drain and mix with the macaroni. Make a white sauce of the other ingredients, reserving bread crumbs for top. Mix the sauce with other mixture and put in greased casserole. Cover with the crumbs and bake 30 minutes in moderate oven (375 degrees). Serves 6.
A simple cheese-sauce bake that stretches a small amount of celery and macaroni into a side dish for six. The instructions compress the sauce-making into a single line, so a little unpacking helps.
- What goes in the sauce"The other ingredients" means shortening, flour, milk, salt and the grated cheese. Melt the fat, stir in the flour, cook a minute, add the milk gradually and stir until thickened, then take it off the heat before the cheese goes in so it melts smoothly rather than breaking.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives 375F, which is at the upper end of what older writers called a moderate oven. Thirty minutes there is enough to heat the dish through and colour the crumbs, since everything in it is already cooked.
- CasseroleHere this means the baking dish, not the stovetop pan. A 1 1/2-quart dish holds the quantity comfortably with room for the crumb layer.
- Cooking the celeryOne cup of water with a pinch of salt, simmered until the celery is just tender, is roughly 8 to 10 minutes for a 1/2-inch dice. Drain it well; wet celery thins the sauce and the top will not brown.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage this generally means a solid vegetable fat. Butter is a better choice in a cheese sauce and gives more flavour for the same tablespoon.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh crumbs with about a tablespoon of melted butter until evenly coated. Unbuttered crumbs dry out and stay pale over a half-hour bake.
- CheeseA firm grating cheese such as sharp Cheddar suits the proportions; half a cup grated is roughly 2 ounces, which makes a mildly cheesy sauce rather than a rich one. Increase it if you want the gratin to read as a cheese dish.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt in the sauce is modest given that the celery is already salted in cooking. Taste the finished sauce before it meets the vegetables, and consider pepper or a scrape of nutmeg, neither of which the original calls for.
Au gratin in its original French sense means a dish finished with a browned crust; the word is generally traced to gratter, to scrape, though the explanation that it refers to the crisp top scraped from the pan is traditional rather than documented. By the time American home-economics booklets of the early twentieth century adopted the term it commonly described a white sauce, grated cheese, buttered crumbs and whatever vegetable was to hand. The addition of macaroni marks this as a thrifty version, bulking out the dish for six from a cup and a half of vegetable.