Fried Celery
Celery cut in three-inch pieces Salt and pepper Batter I, III, or V Parboil celery until soft, drain, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in batter, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. Serve with Tomato Sauce.
A short entrée recipe that assumes you already have Fannie Farmer's batter formulas and a kettle of fat at the ready. Two things decide the outcome: how dry the celery is before it meets the batter, and how hot the fat is.
- Dry the celeryParboiled celery holds a great deal of water between its ribs. Drain it, then blot it thoroughly on a towel, or the batter will slide off and the fat will spit.
- "Parboil until soft"Boil the three-inch lengths in water until a knife tip meets little resistance but the pieces still hold their shape; how long that takes depends on how thick the ribs are. Softer than that and they collapse in the fryer.
- The battersThe numbered batters are separate entries elsewhere in the book. Broadly, Farmer's fritter batters run flour, salt, milk or water, and egg, sometimes with the white beaten separately and folded in; any thin fritter batter that coats the back of a spoon will serve.
- Deep fat temperatureThis recipe gives no test; the book's general directions for deep fat judge it by browning a cube of bread. That corresponds broadly to the 370-380F range used for battered mixtures today. Cooler than that and the batter absorbs grease; much hotter and the coating colors before the celery inside is hot.
- Brown paperBrown paper was a usual draining surface in period kitchens. Use a wire rack over a sheet pan instead, which keeps the underside crisp rather than steaming it.
- Tomato SauceThe book's Tomato Sauce is a flour-and-butter roux thinned with strained stewed tomato, not an Italian-style long-simmered sauce. Any smooth, sharp tomato sauce answers the purpose here, as the point is acidity against the fried batter.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities. Two large heads of celery, trimmed of leaves and the coarsest outer ribs, would make about four servings as an entree course.
- Fry in batchesCrowding the kettle drops the fat temperature sharply. Six to eight pieces at a time, two to three minutes to a deep gold, and let the fat recover before the next batch.
Fried celery belongs to a moment when celery was still something of a luxury vegetable and worth serving in its own right. Through the late nineteenth century it appeared on American tables in cut-glass celery vases, eaten raw as a relish, and it turns up in the celery salt, celery sauces and celery soups scattered through this book. "Entrees" in Farmer's arrangement does not mean the main course in the modern American sense; it means the made dishes served between the fish and the roast in a formal dinner, and a vegetable fritter with a sauce fit that slot neatly. The technique is generic: the same parboil-batter-fry-sauce sequence appears in the period for salsify, cauliflower, artichoke bottoms and eggplant, which is why the recipe can be this brief and simply point to a numbered batter elsewhere in the volume.