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Scalloped Celery with Cheese
2 cups cooked celery cut into Onion salt inch-long pieces
Pepper
2 tablespoons butter
I to 2 tablespoons grated cheese
2 tablespoons flour
Bread-crums
1 cup milk
Make a sauce of the flour, fat, milk and seasonings. Put the celery into this and turn it into a greased ramekin or earthen pudding-dish. Sprinkle with cheese and bread-crums, mixed with a little butter, and bake until a golden brown. This is a simple but hearty dish.
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column typesetting; read straight down it comes to 2 cups cooked celery in inch lengths, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, onion salt, pepper, 1 to 2 tablespoons grated cheese, and bread-crumbs.
- The hingeThis is a white sauce dish, so cook the flour and butter together for a minute or two before the milk goes in. An undercooked roux tastes pasty, and a thin sauce will flood the dish and leave the crumbs soggy.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the instruction is only to bake until golden brown. Around 375F works: everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through and browning the top, roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- Cooking the celerySimmer the cut celery in salted water until just tender, 8 to 10 minutes, then drain it thoroughly. Wet celery will thin the sauce, and celery cooked to collapse gives the flat, stringy texture this dish is often blamed for.
- Onion saltCommercially available seasoning of the period, and still sold. If you have none, use 1/4 teaspoon salt plus a pinch of onion powder, or grate a little onion into the milk and strain it out.
- The cheese quantityOne to two tablespoons is a garnish rather than a cheese sauce, which suggests grated cheese used as a seasoning. A firm dry cheddar or a hard grating cheese suits it; increase it if you want the dish to read as cheesy to a modern palate.
- Ramekin or pudding-dishIn older usage "ramekin" can mean a small baking dish rather than the modern 4-ounce custard cup; the quantities here fill a single dish of about a quart. A shallow gratin dish is better than a deep one for crumb coverage.
- CrumbsUse dry crumbs, not fresh soft ones, and toss them with a teaspoon or two of melted butter so they brown evenly rather than scorching in patches.
- YieldAbout 3 cups finished, which serves two as a light supper or four as a side.
Scalloped vegetables were the backbone of American middle-class cookery in the early twentieth century: a cooked vegetable, a cup of white sauce, a buttered crumb top, and a hot oven. Celery reached the table this way at a time when it was grown in enormous quantities in the muck soils of Michigan and New York and shipped nationwide, and when raw stalks were also served upright as a first course in the celery glass. The recipe is economical, built on a single mother sauce, and recommended in the plain terms of the closing line rather than by any claim to elegance.