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Celery Puree
Prepare half a dozen heads of celery as for celery with gravy, wipe and drain, cutting them into small pieces. Put these into a glazing-pan with an equal quantity of bechamel sauce, reduce well and then pass all through a sieve by rubbing with the back of a spoon. Add one ounce of butter and one teacupful of rich cream to the mixture, and salt and pepper to suit the taste.
A classic French-style vegetable purée thickened with béchamel rather than starch or potato. The original assumes you have read the earlier celery entries in the book and that a sieve and a strong wrist are standard equipment.
- Six heads of celeryA "head" is a whole bunch, not a rib. Six heads is a great deal of celery for one dish by modern standards; two or three bunches will give a generous quantity of purée. Trim off the leaves and the toughest outer ribs, peel away the coarse strings with a swivel peeler, and blanch the cut pieces in salted water until fully tender before they go into the pan.
- "As for celery with gravy"The cross-reference means the celery is trimmed, washed, and cooked soft in liquid first. Raw celery will not reduce to a smooth purée in béchamel, however long you leave it.
- Glazing-panBroadly, a shallow pan used to reduce and glaze quickly. Any broad sauté pan or straight-sided skillet does the same job; the point is surface area, not the vessel.
- An equal quantity of béchamelAn equal quantity of béchamel -- the original does not say whether by volume or by weight; volume against the cooked celery is the easier reading. Make the béchamel on the thick side, since it will be loosened again by the cream at the end.
- Passing through a sieveThe back-of-a-spoon method is what catches the celery strings, and it is the step that separates a good purée from a fibrous one. A food mill on its finest plate does the work faster; a blender alone will not remove fibre, so blend and then sieve.
- A teacupful of creamA Victorian teacup runs smaller than a breakfast cup — figure roughly 3/4 cup, about 175 ml. Warm it before adding so the purée does not slacken and cool at once.
- SeasoningUse white pepper if you want to keep the purée pale. Celery cooked this long loses much of its bite, so the salt matters more than it would in a green vegetable purée; taste after the cream, not before.
- Yield and serviceTwo or three bunches of celery treated this way should give roughly a quart, enough for six to eight as a side, though the original states no yield. A purée of this kind would suit roast or boiled meats; thinned with stock it approaches a cream of celery soup.
Celery reached the American table first as a raw salad vegetable, served upright in tall cut-glass celery vases that were a fixture of ambitious dining rooms in the 1880s and 1890s — a display item as much as a food. By the time Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896, the Waldorf kitchen was treating it the French way as well: braised, glazed, stewed with gravy, and reduced to purées like this one. The technique here is straight out of the classical repertoire, where a purée of vegetable bound with béchamel and finished with butter and cream was a standard garnish for roasts, and where forcing everything through a tamis was routine daily labour for a brigade with plenty of hands. The recipe's terseness and its reliance on a cross-reference to an earlier entry are characteristic of the book: it was written by a hotel man for cooks who already knew the grammar of a professional kitchen.