Home › Salads › Dressed Celery
Dressed Celery
Wash, scrape, and cut stalks of celery in thin slices. Mix with Cream Dressing I.
Two sentences in the original, and both of them assume you have the rest of the book open. The work here is all in the celery itself and in the dressing it points to.
- Find the dressing firstCream Dressing I is a separate entry given elsewhere in the book, and this page supplies none of it. Look it up and have it made before you slice the celery.
- "Scrape" means stringOlder celery varieties were far more fibrous than today's Pascal. Scraping with a paring knife or peeler pulled the coarse outer strings from the convex side of each rib. On modern supermarket celery you only need to do this to the two or three outermost stalks.
- Thin slicesSlice on a sharp diagonal, about an eighth of an inch. The bias cut gives more surface for the dressing to cling to and keeps the pieces from reading as raw sticks.
- CrispingIf the bunch has gone limp, cut the ribs and hold them in ice water for half an hour, then dry thoroughly in a towel or a spinner. Wet celery will thin the dressing into a puddle.
- Dress lateSalt and vinegar draw water out of celery quickly. Combine no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before serving, or the dressing will break down and the celery will slump.
- Use the leavesThe pale inner leaves are not waste. Chopped and folded in, they carry more celery flavour than the ribs do.
- YieldOne large head, trimmed and sliced, gives roughly four cups and serves four to six as a side salad. Figure a scant quarter cup of dressing per cup of celery.
Celery reached American tables as a luxury rather than a staple. Through the nineteenth century it was grown blanched — banked with soil or boards to keep the stalks pale and mild — which made it labour-intensive and expensive, and it was served upright in tall cut-glass celery vases as a display item at formal dinners. Michigan's muck-land farms around Kalamazoo brought the price down in the closing decades of the century, and by the time Fannie Farmer's book appeared in 1896 celery was common enough to be sliced up and dressed like any other salad vegetable. The recipe's brevity is itself the point: the Boston Cooking-School book was built as a system of cross-references, where a master dressing is written out once and then invoked over and over, and a cook who had worked through the salad chapter needed only the two lines given here.