Celery Sauce
1 stalk celery 1 cup salted water 1 cup cream sauce Wash the celery and cut it into pieces one half inch long. Let it cook in the salted water until tender; drain thoroughly; stir the cream sauce into it; bring to a boil and serve with poultry or game.
A plain white-sauce accompaniment of the sort that turned a roast bird into a dinner. Two terms in it mean something different now than they did when it was written.
- "1 stalk celery"In older American cookbooks a stalk of celery often means the whole head, what we now call a bunch, with a single rib called a "branch" or "piece"; usage is not consistent, and some books use "stalk" for the rib. One rib would barely flavour a cup of sauce, so this probably means more than a single rib, trimmed of leaves and the toughest outer ribs.
- Cream sauceUsually milk rather than cream. A white sauce of this period runs about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, with 1 cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season with salt and white pepper before it goes near the celery.
- Cooking the celeryA cup of salted water will steam rather than submerge the pieces if the pan is small and covered. Eight to twelve minutes gives tender celery that still holds its shape; longer and it goes limp and drab.
- Drain thoroughly means itCelery holds a surprising amount of water, and any that carries over will thin the sauce and dull it. Drain in a sieve and let it sit a minute before combining.
- Save the cooking waterThe celery liquor is well flavoured. Using a few spoonfuls of it in place of some of the milk in the white sauce sharpens what is otherwise a very mild sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of sauce plus the cooked celery is enough for several servings alongside a roast chicken, turkey or pheasant.
Celery sauce belongs to the long English line of white sauces built to go with boiled fowl, turkey and game, and it appears in British household books well before it crossed to American ones. Celery itself was a comparatively expensive vegetable through the nineteenth century, grown in trenches and blanched to keep the ribs pale and mild, which is why it turns up in cookbooks of this period as often in a celery glass on the table as in the pot. Celery grew cheaper and more widely available over time, and by the era of Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book the sauce had settled into its place as a standard of the sauce chapter, alongside bread sauce and giblet gravy.