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Creamed Celery (Remove the leaves)
Remove the leaves from the stalks of celery; scrape off all rusted or dark spots; cut into small pieces and drop in cold water. Have boiling water ready; put the celery into it, and salt at the end of ten minutes. Boil until tender, leaving the cover partly off; drain and rinse in cold water. Make a cream sauce; drop the celery into it; heat thoroughly and serve.
A plain turn-of-the-century vegetable side that depends entirely on not overcooking the celery and on a properly seasoned white sauce. A few of the instructions reflect older produce and older habits.
- Why the leaves come offCelery leaves are much stronger and often bitter compared with the ribs, and period cooks routinely stripped them before boiling. They can be saved for stock or a stuffing rather than discarded.
- ScrapingOlder celery was grown in trenches and often blanched with soil, so the outer ribs were stringy and marked. Modern celery usually needs only the coarse strings pulled from the outer ribs with a peeler.
- Salting at ten minutesThe delay is a period habit, not a rule that holds up. Salt the water from the start; it seasons the celery through and has no meaningful effect on cooking time.
- Cover partly offLeaving the lid ajar is the standard period instruction for boiled vegetables, letting volatile compounds escape rather than condensing back into the pot. Harmless to follow.
- TimingThe recipe's own sequence implies more than ten minutes in the pot: salt goes in at the ten-minute mark, and boiling continues until tender. Cut small, celery is usually tender well inside twenty minutes; test with a knife tip and stop while the pieces still hold their shape.
- The cold rinseRinsing in cold water halts the cooking. Drain thoroughly afterwards or the retained water will thin the sauce.
- Cream sauce proportionsA standard white sauce of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, with salt and white pepper. That amount dresses roughly 4 cups of cut celery.
- YieldOne large head of celery serves four as a side dish. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of grated cheese stirred into the sauce is in keeping with the era.
Creamed vegetables were the workhorse of American middle-class cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s: a butter-flour-milk sauce turned almost any boiled vegetable into something considered fit for company, and cookbooks of the period run through celery, onions, carrots, cabbage and peas in near-identical entries. Celery itself was a comparatively prestigious vegetable in that window. It was labour-intensive to blanch, served upright in specialised celery vases on the dinner table, and appears in period menus as a raw relish as often as a cooked dish.