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Cream of Celery Soup
2 cups boiling water. 2 tablespoons butter. Salt. 2 cups White Stock II or III 3 tablespoons flour 3 cups celery, cut in inch pieces 2 cups milk 1 cup cream 1 slice onion
This is Fannie Farmer's shorthand: an ingredient list that assumes you already know the cream-soup formula laid out earlier in the Soups chapter. Reading it as a ratio rather than a set of steps is the key.
- The method the list impliesSimmer the celery in the stock until tender, press it through a sieve, and combine with a thin white sauce made from the flour and scalded milk infused with the onion slice. The cream goes in at the end, off the heat.
- The missing butter and seasoningAs printed here the list gives flour with no fat and no salt or pepper. Farmer's standard thin white sauce uses equal parts butter and flour, so 3 tablespoons butter is implied; season to taste at the end, after the cream, since stock and celery vary in salt.
- White Stock II or IIIA mild, pale stock of the veal-knuckle or fowl type, unbrowned and lightly seasoned. Any light chicken stock works; avoid a dark, heavily reduced or tomato-tinged broth, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Three cups of celeryRoughly a medium head, give or take. The list does not mention the leaves, but they carry a good deal of the flavour and are worth including rather than discarding.
- Sieving versus blendingThe original expects the cooked celery to be forced through a sieve, which removes the strings. A blender pulverises the fibre instead of removing it, so blend and then pass through a fine strainer if you want the smooth texture the recipe intends.
- Do not boil after the creamBring it just to steaming rather than to a boil; hard boiling a milk-and-cream soup risks curdling.
- The onion sliceOne slice, scalded in the milk and then removed. It is there as background seasoning, not as an onion soup; leaving it in or chopping it changes the balance.
- YieldAbout five cups, the liquids as listed, serving four as a first course.
Cream soups of this kind were a signature of the Boston Cooking School: a vegetable purée thinned with stock and bound with a measured white sauce, the same formula reused across celery, asparagus, spinach and corn with only the vegetable swapped. That interchangeability is the point of the terse ingredient list, and it reflects Fannie Farmer's larger project of teaching cookery as a set of proportions rather than a set of stories. Celery itself was still something of a status vegetable in late nineteenth-century America, often served raw and upright in a tall cut-glass celery vase on the dinner table, so a soup made from a whole head would have read as quietly genteel rather than thrifty. Domestic cultivation around Kalamazoo, Michigan, and in the muck soils of upstate New York was by then well established, though how far it had put celery within regular reach of middle-class kitchens is harder to say.