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Celery Sauce
Wash thoroughly, and pare neatly, and cut into dice-shaped pieces, and then wash again in fresh water, two or three roots of fine celery, using only the white parts. Lift them out with the hand so that the sand and dirt will remain at the bottom of the pan, place them in a saucepan, and cover with fresh water, adding two or three pinches of salt, and a small piece of butter. Place the lid on, and cook over a hot fire for twenty minutes; then drain, put in the saucepan again with one pint of hot German sauce, toss well for a short time, and serve.
A short garnish sauce from the Waldorf's service kitchen, written for cooks who already had a stockpot of velouty going. The whole dish hinges on the German sauce, which the book assumes you can produce on demand.
- German sauceThis is sauce allemande: a veal or chicken veloute finished off the heat with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and a squeeze of lemon. It must not boil once the yolks go in, or it will break into threads. A pint is two cups.
- "Roots of celery"Not celeriac. In this period a "root" or "head" of celery meant the whole bunch as pulled; two or three heads, trimmed to the pale inner ribs and hearts, would give perhaps a pound of usable stalks.
- Why two washesField-grown celery was banked with soil to blanch it, so grit sat deep in the ribs. Modern celery is far cleaner, but the instruction to lift the dice out of the water rather than pour them into a colander is still the right way to leave sand behind.
- Twenty minutes is longThat timing suits the coarse, stringy celery of 1896. Today's dice, cut at about half an inch, are tender in eight to twelve minutes of boiling; past that the pieces slump and shed water into the sauce.
- Drain hardAny cooking liquid left clinging will thin the allemande and dull it. Let the celery steam dry in the sieve for a minute before it goes back in the pan.
- Toss, do not stir"Toss well for a short time" means warming the celery through in the sauce over low heat only. Prolonged stirring over a flame will scramble the yolks and mash the dice.
- ServingCelery sauce of this type went to boiled or roast poultry, boiled turkey above all, and to plain boiled veal. It is a component, not a dish, and should be sent out hot.
Celery sauce belongs to the long English and Anglo-American tradition of serving boiled turkey with something white and rich, a pairing that appears in household books throughout the nineteenth century and survived on hotel menus well past it. What marks this version out is the base: rather than milk or cream thickened with flour, it reaches for sauce allemande, the egg-enriched veloute that classical French kitchens treated as one of the mother sauces of the period. After 1914 many French kitchens took to calling it sauce parisienne; Escoffier later demoted it to a derivative of veloute rather than a foundation in its own right. Its presence here is a reminder that The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) was written from inside a brigade kitchen, where a pint of finished allemande was something a cook fetched rather than made, and where celery, a vegetable that retained a certain cachet, was worth pared, diced and sauced as a course in its own right.