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Cream of Celery
1 stalk celery. 1 pint boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 tablespoon chopped onion 1/2 bay leaf 3 cups cream stock Wash and scrape the celery; cut it into half-inch pieces and cook with the water, salt, onion and bay leaf until thoroughly with the water, salt, onion and bay leaf until thoroughly tender. Mash in the water in which it has boiled; add the cream sauce and serve
A short, workmanlike cream soup whose printed text has two obvious flaws: the celery has no quantity and a whole clause is duplicated by the typesetter. Neither is hard to work around.
- The missing celeryThe ingredient list gives water, salt, onion and bay leaf but never says how much celery. For 1 pint of water and 3 cups of cream sauce, a full head — roughly 4 cups of half-inch pieces, leaves and all — is the right order of magnitude.
- The repeated line"until thoroughly with the water, salt, onion and bay leaf until thoroughly tender" is a compositor's slip, not an instruction. Read it as: cook the celery with the water, salt, onion and bay leaf until thoroughly tender, about 20-25 minutes.
- "Cream stock" means cream sauceThe list says stock, the method says sauce; the method is correct. Make a thin white sauce in the usual period proportions — roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of milk, for 3 cups of scalded milk or half milk and half cream, cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour.
- Mash, or do better"Mash in the water in which it has boiled" is the method the book gives; a purée sieve or food mill would have done the same work. A blender or immersion blender gives a far smoother result; pass it through a sieve afterward if you want the celery strings out entirely, since they do not break down.
- Fish out the bay leafHalf a bay leaf blitzed into the soup turns it bitter and gritty. Remove it before mashing or blending.
- Do not boil after the sauce goes inOnce the cream sauce is combined, keep the pot below a simmer. A hard boil risks curdling the milk and splitting the surface.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt seasons the cooking water only. Taste and correct after the sauce is added; white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are the period-appropriate finish.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, serving four as a first course. Celery cream soups of this era were sent out with croutons or toasted crackers.
Cream soups built on a milk-thickened white sauce rather than a meat stock were a fixture of American cookery from the 1880s onward, promoted heavily by the cooking-school movement as economical, digestible and suitable for invalids and children. Celery was the natural candidate: it was cheap, widely grown in the muck lands of Michigan and New York, and sold by the bunch with far more coarse outer stalk than any household could eat raw off the celery glass. The formula — vegetable simmered with an aromatic, mashed into its own cooking water, let down with a thin white sauce — repeats across many contemporary books with only the vegetable changed, which is why loose-leaf collections such as this one could print it so tersely and assume the reader already knew what a cream sauce was.