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Celery Sauce
½ cup chopped cooked celery 1 cup medium white sauce Add celery to white sauce. Serve with boiled fowls.
A two-line recipe that assumes you already know what a medium white sauce is. That assumption is the only real obstacle.
- Medium white sauceIn books of this period, medium means 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup of milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Thin was 1 tablespoon of each, thick 3 or 4.
- Cooking the celerySimmer sliced celery in salted water or a little chicken stock until tender, about 10-12 minutes, then drain and chop. Celery cooked whole and chopped after holds its texture better than celery chopped raw and boiled to mush.
- Use the cooking liquidReplacing a few tablespoons of the milk with the celery water gives the sauce a flavour the plain version lacks. The original leaves this out, but it costs nothing.
- SeasoningNothing here is seasoned. Salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are common seasonings for a milk-based white sauce and can be added at the roux stage.
- TextureCook the flour and butter a minute or two before adding milk, and add the milk gradually off the heat, or the sauce will taste pasty. Strings in the celery are worth peeling off with a vegetable peeler before cooking.
- YieldAbout a cup and a half of sauce, enough for four servings alongside a boiled or poached chicken.
- Serving"Boiled fowls" means a poached or gently simmered older chicken. The sauce also suits poached white fish, turkey, and boiled ham cut in slices.
Celery sauce belongs to the large family of white sauces long current in English and American cookery, in which a vegetable or herb is folded into a butter-flour-milk base and served with plain boiled meat. Such sauces were the usual answer to the same problem: a boiled fowl is mild, moist and dull on its own, and needs something poured over it. Celery had a particular claim to the job in America, where it was a prized and heavily marketed crop by the late nineteenth century, sold for the table in tall glass celery vases and grown in quantity in the muck soils of Michigan and New York.