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Sauce (Tablespoons butter browned)
3 tablespoons butter browned. 3 tablespoons flour. 1 cup celery. 1/2 onion. 1/2 cup stock from onion and celery. Season and add bits of celery.
This is shorthand rather than a method — a list of proportions for a brown celery sauce meant to go over boiled or roast meat. The steps have to be reconstructed, and the liquid quantity as written will not make a pourable sauce.
- The hinge: brown the butter and flour together"Butter browned" means cooking the butter until it turns nut-brown, then stirring in the flour and letting the roux darken to the colour of weak coffee. That browning is the entire character of the sauce; a pale roux gives you a bland white gravy with celery in it.
- Cook the vegetables first, and keep the waterThe half cup of "stock from onion and celery" is the liquid the vegetables were simmered in. Chop the cup of celery and the half onion, simmer them in about 2 cups of lightly salted water until tender, then lift out the vegetables and reserve the cooking water.
- Half a cup of liquid is far too littleThree tablespoons of flour will absorb roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of liquid before it stops being a paste. Use the full reserved cooking liquid, topped up with meat stock or water, and add it gradually to keep the sauce smooth.
- "1 cup celery" is by volume, choppedThat is about three medium ribs, diced small — roughly 4 oz. The half onion is assumed to be a medium yellow one, so about 1/2 cup chopped.
- Season"Season" here almost certainly means salt and pepper. A brown roux sauce takes salt heavily; taste at the end, and a spoonful of the meat's own pan drippings does more for it than anything else.
- Add the celery back at the endThe "bits of celery" are most likely the pieces you simmered, returned to the finished sauce so they stay distinct. Stir them in off the heat rather than cooking them down into the sauce.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 cups once the liquid is corrected — enough for four to six servings of boiled beef, brisket, veal, or roast fowl.
Mrs. Wilson's cookery writing drew on material she produced for the Ladies' Home Journal around the end of the First World War, when her columns were built on stretching meat and wasting nothing — which is exactly what this entry is. The sauce belongs to the large family of nineteenth-century brown sauces built on a browned roux, the domestic cousins of the French espagnole, and celery sauce in particular was a standing partner for boiled meats and for turkey in English and American cookery through the 1800s. The telling detail is that the cooking water from the vegetables becomes the stock: nothing is thrown out, and the recipe is written in the compressed, listed form of a note to a cook who already knew how to make gravy and only needed the proportions.