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Sauce (Wash and scrape celery before)
Wash and scrape celery before cutting into pieces. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, drain, rub through a sieve, and add to sauce. Celery sauce is often made from the stock in which fowl or turkey has been boiled, or with onehalf stock and one-half milk.
This is a fragment of a longer white-sauce entry, and the ingredient list has been mangled in transcription: read "14 cup butter" as 1/4 cup butter. The liquid quantity is missing entirely, so you are working from the standard proportions the book assumes elsewhere.
- The missing liquidThe original text gives no amount. A quarter cup each of butter and flour would carry somewhere in the region of 2 cups of stock, milk, or the half-and-half mixture described; treat that as a working figure rather than something the recipe states.
- How much celeryNo quantity is given. One large head, or about 3 cups of cut stalks, cooks down to roughly a cup of purée, which is the right weight of flavour for 2 cups of sauce.
- Cook the roux firstMelt the butter, stir in the flour, and let it bubble a minute or two before the liquid goes in. Skipping that step is what makes an old-fashioned white sauce taste of raw flour, and the celery purée will not hide it.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing boiled celery through a sieve removes the stringy fibres that run the length of the stalk. A blender chops them rather than removing them, so if you use one, pass the purée through a sieve afterward anyway or peel the stalks first.
- The poultry stockStock from a boiled fowl was a free by-product in 1896; unsalted chicken stock is the modern stand-in. If you use commercial stock, hold back on salt until the sauce is finished, since reduction concentrates whatever is already in it.
- SeasoningThe base white sauce in this section is seasoned with salt and pepper only. Celery sauce takes well to a scrape of nutmeg and a spoonful of cream at the end, though neither is in the original.
- Yield and servingAround 2 cups if you use that much liquid, enough for a boiled fowl or turkey serving six to eight. Celery sauce was a common accompaniment to boiled or roast poultry, and was also served with plain white fish.
Celery sauce belongs to the family of flour-thickened white sauces that organise the whole sauce chapter of Fannie Farmer's 1896 book: one butter-and-flour base, varied by liquid and by whatever vegetable, herb or shellfish is stirred through it. The economy of the thing is the point — a fowl was boiled, the stock became the sauce, and the sauce came back to the table with the bird. Celery itself was still a slightly grand vegetable in late nineteenth-century America, grown blanched and pale, sold in specialised celery vases for the table, and its season ran through the autumn and winter months when boiled poultry was most likely to appear. Pairing it with turkey or fowl was long-established English practice that American cookbooks appear to have taken up in their turn, and the affinity survives today in the celery that goes into stuffings.