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Celery, Stewed
Wash the stalks clean, cut them into inchlong pieces, and soak an hour in cold water. Drain, and place the celery in a stewpan, with boiling water to cover and let it simmer slowly one-half hour or until tender, by which time the water should be so reduced as to measure not quite one-half cup. Add a cup of cream or milk, and when the liquid boils, thicken it to a cream with a little flour rubbed smooth in a tablespoon of butter. Add salt and pepper and serve.
A plain creamed vegetable of the sort that filled out a turn-of-the-century dinner. The only real technique here is judging the liquid: the celery water must reduce nearly to nothing before the cream goes in, or the sauce will never thicken.
- Watch the reduction, not the clockThe half hour is a guide. Simmer uncovered so the water falls to just under half a cup; if the celery is tender first, lift it out and boil the liquid down before adding the cream.
- Modern celery is more tenderTesting early -- Start testing for tenderness at about 15 minutes rather than waiting out the full half hour, and peel the coarse outer ribs with a vegetable peeler to remove the strings.
- The hour's soakThis was to crisp and clean field-grown celery that arrived gritty and often blanched in soil. With washed supermarket celery, 10 minutes in cold water is ample, or skip it.
- Beurre manié, not a roux"Flour rubbed smooth in a tablespoon of butter" is raw butter kneaded with flour, dropped into the boiling liquid in small pieces. Use about 1 tablespoon flour to 1 tablespoon butter for a cup of cream, and simmer two or three minutes afterward to cook out the floury taste.
- CreamPeriod cream was generally thinner than modern heavy cream and varied a good deal; light cream or half-and-half is the closer substitute. Heavy cream will need less flour; whole milk will need the full tablespoon.
- SeasoningCelery cooked this long loses most of its aroma, so the dish leans on the dairy. White pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, or the reserved pale inner leaves stirred in at the end all help.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Roughly one large head of celery with a cup of cream will serve about four as a side dish.
Celery became a fixture on American tables in the nineteenth century, first as a luxury raw vegetable, served upright in tall cut-glass celery vases and listed on menus alongside olives and radishes; the bleached, mild-tasting stalks were a point of pride for market gardeners around Kalamazoo, Michigan, and other muck-soil districts. Cooked celery, as here, was presumably the thriftier use for the coarse outer ribs left after the tender heart went to the relish dish, though that is an inference rather than documented practice, and creaming was the standard treatment for almost any boiled vegetable in a book of this period. The Butterick Cook Book (1911), issued by the pattern company as part of its wide line of domestic manuals, reflects that habit throughout its vegetable chapter: boil, reduce, thicken with butter and flour, season simply.