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Celery in White Sauce
Wash, scrape, and cut celery stalks in one-inch pieces; cook twenty minutes or until soft in boiling salted water; drain, and to two cups celery add one cup White Sauce I. This is a most satisfactory way of using the outer stalks of celery.
Fried Celery, Tomato Sauce Wash and scrape celery, cut in three-inch pieces, dip in batter, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with Tomato Sauce.
Batter. Mix one-half cup bread flour, one-fourth teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, one-third cup milk, and one egg well beaten.
Chiccory or Endive Chiccory or endive may be obtained throughout the year, but during January, February, March, and April supply is imported. It is used only for salads.
Two straightforward ways with celery, plus a batter and a note on chicory that is reference material rather than instruction. Nothing here is difficult; the main adjustments are cooking time and fat temperature.
- White Sauce IFannie Farmer's white sauces are graded by thickness, built on butter and flour cooked together and whisked with milk — roughly a tablespoon of each per cup of milk for a thin sauce, two for a medium one. For celery, a medium sauce coats without drowning; season with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg.
- Twenty minutes is too longCelery cut in one-inch pieces is tender in about 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water, depending on how stringy the outer stalks are. Twenty minutes gives you the soft, faintly grey celery of an older style of vegetable cookery. Test with a knife tip rather than watching the clock.
- ScrapingThe instruction means removing the coarse strings from the convex back of the outer stalks with a paring knife or peeler. This matters more with the tough outer ribs the recipe is designed to use up; inner stalks rarely need it.
- Deep fat temperatureFor the fried version, 375F is right for three-inch pieces in a thin batter — hot enough to set the coating before the celery steams itself loose. Blanching the pieces for a few minutes first and drying them well gives a better result than frying raw celery, which stays crunchy inside.
- Batter consistencyHalf a cup of flour, a third of a cup of milk and one egg makes a thick coating batter, closer to pancake batter than tempura. It will cling heavily; thin it with another tablespoon or two of milk if you want a lighter jacket.
- Brown paperPlain unprinted brown paper is what the recipe means. Paper towels work, but a wire rack over a sheet pan keeps the underside from going soft.
- YieldTwo cups of cooked celery with a cup of sauce serves four as a side dish. The batter is enough for about two cups of celery pieces.
- The chicory noteThe closing paragraph is a market note, not part of the recipe. It also reflects the practice of the book's own period: cooked chicory and endive are perfectly good braised or gratineed, whatever the book says about salads only.
This entry belongs to a thrifty tradition of using every part of the vegetable: the tender inner stalks went raw onto the celery glass at table, a fixture of the late-Victorian American dinner, while the tough green outer ribs were boiled and sauced. Celery was a comparatively expensive, labour-intensive crop in the nineteenth century — it was trenched and blanched by hand — which explains both its status as a centrepiece relish and the care taken not to waste the outside. The white sauce itself is the workhorse of the Boston Cooking School method, taught as a graded formula so a student could produce thin, medium or thick from the same technique and apply it to anything from oysters to boiled onions.