Celery Soup
One cup chopped celery; boil in 1 quart beef broth till tender, salt and pepper; serve with crackers
A one-line soup that assumes a pot of beef broth is already on the stove, which in 1900 it usually was. The quality of the broth is the whole dish.
- The hinge is the brothWith only celery, salt and pepper in play, a weak or oversalted stock has nowhere to hide. Use a good unsalted or low-sodium beef stock and season at the end, after the celery has given up its own salinity.
- How much celeryOne cup chopped is roughly two to three medium ribs. Include the pale inner ribs and their leaves, which carry more aroma than the outer stalks.
- Cooking timeSliced thin, celery is tender in roughly 12 to 15 minutes; the recipe says boil, but a gentle simmer is kinder. Long cooking dulls the colour and drives off the volatile aroma that is the point of the soup.
- Serve with crackersThe period reference is to plain soda or oyster crackers, not a seasoned snack cracker. Any thin unsweetened cracker works; sweetened or heavily salted ones will unbalance a soup this spare.
- YieldOne quart of broth serves two generously or four as a first course. It does not thicken, so treat it as a clear soup rather than a cream.
- If you want bodyMany period celery soups finish with milk thickened with a spoonful of flour and butter. This version has no thickener at all, and adding dairy turns it into a different dish.
Celery reached American tables in quantity in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Kalamazoo, Michigan and other muck-soil districts began shipping it widely, and it moved from luxury to everyday vegetable. It was often served raw and upright in a glass celery vase as a mark of a well-set table. Recipes of this brevity are common in turn-of-the-century community and "reliable" collections, which tended to assume a household stockpot and wrote only the part a cook could not guess: what goes in, how long, and what to put alongside.