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Celery Soup II
3 stalks celery 3 tablespoons butter 3 cups milk 3 tablespoons flour 1 slice onion Salt and pepper 1 cup cream Break celery in one-inch pieces, and pound in a mortar Cook in double boiler with onion and milk twenty minutes and strain. Thicken with butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper, add cream, strain into tureen, and serve at once. 1 can corn
A cream-of-celery in the book's "soups without stock" pattern: flavor drawn into milk, then bound with a butter-and-flour roux. Two things in the text need sorting out before you start.
- The stray line"1 can corn" at the end appears to belong to the following recipe and to have been pulled in by the typesetting. Ignore it.
- "3 stalks celery"Period American usage was inconsistent, and "stalk" could mean either a single rib or the whole head. Three heads would be a great deal for three cups of milk; read it as three generous ribs with their leaves, and taste as you go.
- Instead of a mortarThe pounding is only there to rupture the cells so the celery gives up its flavor to the milk. A food processor, or simply slicing the ribs very thin across the grain, does the same work in seconds.
- Double boilerNot fussiness. Milk held directly over heat for twenty minutes scorches on the bottom and skins on top. A heavy saucepan over low heat with frequent stirring works if you have no double boiler insert.
- The rouxCook the 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour together two or three minutes without letting them color, then whisk the hot strained celery milk in gradually. Adding hot liquid to a raw flour-and-butter paste is what produces lumps.
- Strain twiceThe first straining removes the celery and onion; the second, into the tureen, catches any flour lumps and the fibrous threads celery sheds. Skipping the second is the usual reason this soup comes out stringy.
- Cream at the end, off the heatCream at the end -- Add the cup of cream after the soup has thickened and let it come back only to steaming rather than boiling.
- YieldFour cups of dairy plus thickening gives four modest first-course servings. Salt more assertively than you expect; a stockless milk soup tastes flat without it, and a little white pepper suits it better than black.
This is one of the celery soups in Fannie Merritt Farmer's chapter of soups made without meat stock, a category that mattered enormously in a household where stock meant a pot watched for hours. The formula here is simply a thin white sauce infused with a vegetable, the same template the Boston Cooking School applied to asparagus, corn, potato and pea, and it is one of the clearest illustrations of Farmer's teaching method: learn one proportion of butter, flour and milk and you have learned a dozen dishes. Celery was a fashionable and comparatively expensive vegetable in late nineteenth-century America, often sold blanched and pale and served raw in tall cut-glass vases at the table, so a soup calling for nothing more than three stalks turned that costly luxury into an everyday dish.