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Scalloped Celery with Cheese
2 cups cooked celery cut into inch-long pieces 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk Onion salt Pepper 1 to 2 tablespoons grated cheese Bread-crums Make a sauce of the flour, fat, milk and seasonings. Put the celery into this and turn it into a greased ramekin or earthen pudding-dish. Sprinkle with cheese and bread-crums, mixed with a little butter, and bake until a golden brown. This is a simple but hearty dish.
A plain white-sauce gratin from the era when celery was treated as a cooked vegetable rather than a raw garnish. The recipe assumes you already have cooked celery on hand and gives no oven temperature or timing.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, only "bake until a golden brown." A moderate oven, around 350-375F, for twenty to twenty-five minutes will heat the filling through and colour the crumbs; the sauce and celery are already cooked, so this is a browning step only.
- Cooking the celery firstTwo cups of inch-long cooked pieces will take somewhere between half a head and a whole one, depending on size. Simmer in salted water 8-10 minutes until just tender and drain well -- wet celery will thin the sauce into a puddle.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each butter and flour to one cup milk is a standard medium white sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding milk, and let the finished sauce simmer a couple of minutes so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Onion saltStill sold, and here it is doing the seasoning work on its own. A quarter teaspoon is enough for a cup of sauce; if you use fresh onion instead, cook it in the butter before the flour goes in and add salt separately.
- CheeseOne to two tablespoons is a token amount by current taste. A half cup of grated sharp cheddar, some stirred into the sauce and the rest on top, gives the dish the flavour the title promises.
- CrumbsFresh soft crumbs tossed with a tablespoon of melted butter brown evenly; dry fine crumbs scorch before the centre is hot. Scatter them loosely rather than pressing them down.
- Dish and yieldAn earthen pudding-dish of about a quart, or four individual ramekins. This serves two as a light supper or four as a side.
Scalloped vegetables -- anything layered or bound with sauce, topped with buttered crumbs and baked -- were a fixture of American household cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, and celery was a favourite candidate because it was cheap, plentiful in autumn and winter, and kept well in a cold cellar. Celery had been an expensive novelty in the mid-1800s, served upright in cut-glass vases as a mark of a well-set table; by the early twentieth century commercial growing in Michigan and California had helped make it an everyday vegetable, and cookbooks of the period found uses for the coarse outer stalks left over after the tender hearts went to the relish dish. A white sauce, a little cheese and a crumb top was the standard answer. The closing line -- "simple but hearty" -- reads as the period's own summary of what such a dish was for.