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Celery Sauce for Boiled Fowls
Wash thoroughly and trim a head of celery. Put it into boiling water, with one tablespoonful of salt, and boil it until it is tender. Then drain it through a colander, and cut into pieces one-half inch in length. Blend a large tablespoonful of flour with one-fourth pint of the broth in which the fowls are boiling. Mix till it is quite smooth, add one ounce of butter, a small piece of grated nutmeg, and salt to taste, and mix it with one-fourth pint of milk. Place it over the fire in a saucepan, and stir it till it boils. Let it boil for ten minutes and then throw in the pieces of celery; when it is quite hot again, pour it into a sauce-tureen, and serve.
A plain white sauce built on fowl broth rather than plain milk, which is what makes it worth the trouble. The measurements are Victorian but translate cleanly.
- A head of celeryThis means a whole bunch, not a single rib. Trim the base and the leafy tops, keeping the tender inner leaves aside if you want them for garnish.
- One-fourth pintHalf a cup, twice over: half a cup of the fowl broth and half a cup of milk, so about a cup of liquid before the celery goes in. How much sauce you end with depends on the size of the head of celery.
- Blending the flourThe recipe takes the liquid straight from the pot in which the fowls are boiling, and flour dropped into hot liquid clumps; whisk it to a slack paste with a little of the broth first, then thin with the rest.
- Ten minutes of boilingThis is not padding. Raw flour tastes chalky, and a sauce thickened this way needs sustained simmering to lose that. Keep it moving with a whisk and cut the heat if it thickens past coating consistency.
- Butter in at the startAn ounce is two tablespoons.
- Boiling the celeryThe recipe says only to boil until tender, and a whole head will take longer than cut ribs. It is added back only at the end, so it should be fully cooked before it goes in; the sauce reheats it rather than cooking it.
- Nutmeg"A small piece of grated nutmeg" is a few strokes on a grater, well under a quarter teaspoon. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg is flat and will read as dusty in a pale sauce.
- SaltThe celery water takes a tablespoon of salt, and the fowl broth is already seasoned, so taste before adding more at the end.
Celery sauce was common in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, and was often served with boiled poultry -- turkey at Christmas, fowl the rest of the year. The dish depends on a habit modern kitchens have largely lost: poaching a whole bird in water and treating the resulting broth as an ingredient, so that the sauce is made from the same pot as the meat it dresses. Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf whose name fronts this 1896 collection, gathered a great many such standard household sauces alongside the hotel's showpieces; the Waldorf salad, credited to him, is celery and apple. Blanched, pale, self-bleaching varieties were widely grown in America in this period, milder and more tender than the dark green Pascal celery that dominates supermarkets now.