Celery Soup
Two cups celery, 1 quart cold water, 2 slices onion, 4 tbsp. butter, 2 tbsp. flour, 2 cups scalded milk, 11½ tsp. salt, cayenne, celery salt. Chop celery, cook in water till tender, cook onion in milk twenty minutes, strain. Melt butter, add flour and seasonings. Combine celery and milk mixtures; thicken with butter and flour cooked together, cook five minutes, then serve. (Copied.) THE PHILATHEA COOK Boдk
A plain white soup of the Boston Cooking School type: celery cooked in water, milk infused with onion, and the two bound with a butter-and-flour roux. The printed text has at least one obvious typesetting slip.
- The salt figure is a misprint"11½ tsp. salt" for six cups of liquid would be inedible; the intended amount is 1½ teaspoons. Season toward the end in any case, since celery and celery salt both carry sodium.
- Strain, or don'tThe instruction to strain most likely applies to the onion-infused milk, since it follows straight after it. Read that way, the celery and its cooking water go in whole, giving a rough, brothy soup; pressing the cooked celery through a sieve, or a short blitz with an immersion blender, gives the smooth cream soup of the same family.
- Scalded milkMilk brought just to the point where bubbles form at the edge of the pan, around 180F, not boiled. With modern pasteurised milk the scalding is no longer necessary for keeping, but it does speed the onion infusion and helps the soup come together without a skin forming.
- Roux proportionsFour tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour is deliberately butter-heavy and will give a loose, glossy soup rather than a thick one. Cook the flour in the butter a full two minutes before it meets the liquid, or the soup tastes pasty.
- Adding the thickeningWhisk the hot liquid into the roux a ladle at a time rather than dropping the roux into the pot, which is the reliable way to avoid lumps. The five-minute simmer at the end is what cooks out the raw flour.
- Celery saltStill sold, and still a blend of ground celery seed and salt. If you use it, cut the plain salt back accordingly; a quarter teaspoon is plenty here.
- Two cups of celeryThat is roughly four to five ribs, chopped. Include the leaves, which are worth using in a soup this simple.
- YieldAbout six cups, or four modest first-course servings. Like most flour-and-milk soups it is best fresh, and wants gentle reheating rather than a hard boil.
The "(Copied.)" at the end is the honest note of a church-society contributor, and the recipe follows the same formula as Fannie Farmer's cream of celery soup in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book and its many imitators, though the quantities differ: a cream soup built on white sauce plus a cooked vegetable, a pattern common in American soup cookery from the 1890s through the 1920s. Philathea classes were young women's Bible-study groups affiliated with the Baraca movement, and their fundraising cookbooks often carried recipes copied out from printed sources as well as from members' own kitchens. Celery itself was a fashionable vegetable in that period, expensive enough to be served raw in cut-glass vases at holiday tables, and a soup like this may have been a thrifty way to use the tougher outer ribs and leaves that were too coarse for the celery dish.