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Cream of Celery Soup
3 celery stalks Water 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 11/2 1½ cups milk Salt and pepper Cut the celery into small pieces; cover with water and bring slowly to a boil. Boil ten minutes and then place in the cooker for two hours. Blend the butter and flour; add milk and cook. To this add drained celery water. Season with salt and pepper.
A simple white-sauce soup built on celery cooking liquid, written for a fireless cooker — an insulated box that held preheated food at temperature for hours without fuel. The method adapts directly to a modern low oven or a slow cooker.
- What the cooker wasA fireless cooker was an insulated chest with a tight lid; food was brought to a boil on the range, then sealed in to finish on retained heat. Two hours in the cooker corresponds to about two hours in a slow cooker on low, or a covered pot in a 200F oven.
- Celery stalks, not bunches"3 celery stalks" is ambiguous: in books of this period the word could mean either three ribs or three whole heads. Three ribs gives a thin, delicately flavoured broth; six to eight ribs, plus the leaves and any tough outer pieces, gives a soup that tastes of celery.
- The milk quantityThe amount of milk as printed is unclear. Two tablespoons butter and three tablespoons flour is a standard roux for about one and a half cups of liquid, so 1½ cups milk is the sensible reading.
- Order of operationsCook the butter and flour together a minute or two before the milk goes in, then add the milk gradually and stir until it thickens. Adding the celery water last, off the fierce heat, keeps the sauce from breaking.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inOnce the celery liquid joins the white sauce, hold it below a simmer. A hard boil on a flour-thickened milk base scorches on the bottom and can curdle if the celery water is at all acidic.
- Save the celeryThe recipe uses only the drained liquid. The cooked celery itself can be pressed through a sieve or blended into the finished soup for body.
- YieldAs written this makes roughly a pint to a pint and a half, depending on how much celery water goes in — two small first-course servings. Double everything for four.
Fireless cookery had a real vogue in American households between about 1900 and the 1920s, promoted as a fuel saver at a time when cooking meant tending a coal or wood range in a hot kitchen. Food was brought to the boil, then shut into a straw- or mineral-wool-lined box, sometimes with preheated soapstone discs, and left to finish on its own heat. Cream of celery itself belongs to the long line of cream soups built on a butter-and-flour white sauce, which let a cook stretch a few vegetables and a cup or two of milk into a course.