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Boiled Celery
Trim off all outside pieces, and suppress the roots of three heads of celery, cut them into lengths of six inches each, wash well and tie together. Cover them with boiling water in a saucepan, add a piece of mace, some peppercorns, an onion, and a little salt, and then boil. Put one tablespoonful of flour and one tablespoonful of butter into a saucepan, and when it is melted add sufficient water to that in which the celery was boiled to make the sauce. Beat the yolk of an egg with the juice of a lemon, and when the sauce is off the fire stir it in, adding a pinch of salt. When the celery is done, place it on a dish, cut off the string that fastens it together, and pour over the sauce.
A plain French treatment of celery as a hot vegetable, finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison. The recipe gives no times and no oven, so the judgment lies entirely in the sauce.
- The hinge: no boiling after the yolkThe yolk and lemon go in with the pan off the heat and the sauce below a simmer, then it is served at once. Return it to the burner and the yolk scrambles into grains that will not smooth out again.
- "Suppress the roots"A literal carry-over from the French supprimer — cut away the root end and the base of the head. Nothing is being suppressed in the English sense.
- MaceUse a blade of mace, the lacy covering of the nutmeg, not ground mace, which will cloud the cooking water and cannot be fished out. Ground nutmeg is a related but not identical flavour and, like ground mace, will cloud the liquid.
- Cooking timeTied six-inch lengths of celery take about 15 to 25 minutes at a gentle boil, depending on thickness. Test with a knife tip at the thick end; the stalks should give without collapsing.
- Strain the liquidThe cooking water carries the onion, peppercorns and mace. Strain it before adding it to the roux, and reduce it a little if it tastes thin — three heads of celery release a good deal of water.
- Sauce proportionsA tablespoon each of flour and butter will thicken roughly a cup of liquid to a coating consistency. "Sufficient water" means topping up the strained celery liquor to about that amount.
- Modern celeryCelery sold today differs from the blanched winter celery common in the 1890s, and the outer ribs still want peeling with a vegetable peeler to remove the tough fibres.
- YieldThree heads will serve roughly four to six as a hot vegetable course alongside roast meat or poultry.
Celery reached American tables in the nineteenth century first as a raw luxury — served upright in tall cut-glass vases as part of the relish course, which is why celery vases turn up in period silver and pressed-glass catalogues. Cooking it as a vegetable, as here, follows French practice, where braised and boiled celery had long been standard; the finish of egg yolk and lemon beaten into a flour-and-butter sauce off the heat is the classic liaison, the same one that underlies sauce poulette. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, was presented as the repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, and this recipe retains tells like "suppress the roots" that read as literal translation from French.