Celery Sauce
Mix two tablespoons rice flour with half teacup butter substitute, have ready a pint of boiling milk; stir the flour and butter substitute into the milk; take three heads of celery, cut into small bits and boil for a few minutes in water, which strain off; put the celery into the melted butter and keep stirred over the fire for five or ten minutes. This is very nice with boiled fowl or turkey.
How to Make Jellies and Marmalades Just how best to use corn syrup in preserving and jelly making, is a question frequently asked. Herein is the reason for its use as well as the best way to use it always in combination with sugar.
Its use makes the product, whether preserves, jelly, marmalade or oldfashioned jam, much finer and smoother in texture, of far fruitier and richer flavor, as well as serving to prevent the hardening of the fruit and the crystalization of the sugar. In other words, corn syrup gives a better product with better keeping qualities.
Here, then, is a distinct addition to our preserving methods. It has been practiced in Great Britain for many years and England and Scotland produce the finest preserves, use large quantities and serve them in many ways.
The secret of their success lies in the blending of corn syrup with sugarequal weight of each is used to make a 3/4 syrup.
Some fruits make better jelly than others; this because of the pectin in them.
Currants, sour apples, crab apples, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, partly ripened grapes and quinces make good jelly; peaches, pears, strawberries and cherries are deficient in certain substances nécessary to produce a jelly of good consistency and flavor. This deficiency may be overcome, however, by combining these juices with those that make good jelly.
A fruit juice that is good for making jelly is one that contains pectin, the essential jelly-making substance. Juices extracted by cooking are apparently far richer in this substance than juices extracted from the raw fruit. To determine whether a juice contains pectin, one or two tablespoonsful of the hot juice should be mixed thoroughly with an equal volume of grain alcohol (90 to 95 per cent), and the mixture should be cooled. If pectin is present, a gelatinous mass, which can be gathered on a spoon, will appear in the liquid.
A white sauce built on rice flour rather than wheat, meant to be poured over boiled poultry. Note that the page runs straight on into an unrelated essay on jelly making; only the first few lines are the sauce.
- The order of operationsThe rice flour and fat are creamed together and then stirred into boiling milk, which can still go lumpy. Safer to cook the rice flour and fat together over low heat for a minute or two first, then whisk in the hot milk gradually.
- Butter substituteThis is wartime and interwar language for margarine or a vegetable shortening, used when butter was scarce or dear. Butter works and tastes better; half a teacup is roughly 6 tablespoons, which is generous for a pint of milk — 4 tablespoons is plenty.
- TeacupAn old teacup is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the term was never standardised. Treat it as an approximation, not a measurement.
- Rice flourIt thickens more gently than wheat flour and gives a slightly grainy, very white sauce that will not brown. Use the same weight of wheat flour if you want a smoother result, or keep rice flour for a gluten-free version.
- Three heads of celeryA head here means a whole bunch, not a stalk. Three bunches would swamp a pint of sauce; one bunch of inner ribs, or two if they are slender, is closer to what a modern cook wants.
- The blanchingThe brief boil and draining removes the harsh, grassy edge from the celery. Do not skip it, and do not boil so long that the pieces collapse — two or three minutes is enough.
- FinishingFive to ten minutes over the heat cooks out the raw starch and softens the celery. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; the original assumes the cook knows to do this.
- YieldRoughly a pint of sauce, enough to serve with a boiled fowl.
- The pectin test in the appended essayMixing hot juice with 90–95 per cent grain alcohol is a genuine old laboratory test for pectin, but the tested sample is for observation only and must be thrown out, never returned to the pot.
Celery sauce was a standard English accompaniment to boiled fowl, turkey and rabbit through the nineteenth century, appearing in many household manuals of the period alongside bread sauce and egg sauce; boiled poultry was pale, mild and in need of something, and celery supplied it. The phrase "butter substitute" suggests a date somewhere between the First World War and the interwar decades, when butter, sugar and wheat were all subject to conservation campaigns in American kitchens and the term persisted into the 1920s and 30s — which also explains the rice flour standing in for wheat. The jelly essay that follows on the same page belongs to the same moment: corn syrup was heavily promoted as a partial replacement for scarce sugar in preserving, and the claim that British preserving practice depends on blending syrup with sugar is best read as period marketing rather than settled fact.