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Celery with Marrow
Wash and trim ten or a dozen heads of celery and put them in boiling water to blanch for ten minutes; then drain, put them into a stewpan, cover with white stock and allow them to boil gently until they are done and tender. Then drain again, dress them on thin slices of toasted bread on a dish with four large pieces of boiled marrow around and pour over one pint of good brown sauce. Previously reduce the sauce with one-half pint of the sauce in which the celery was stewed, adding a little sugar to season it.
A French braised-celery garnish scaled for a hotel kitchen. The work is in the two sauces, not the vegetable, and the amounts as written will feed a crowd.
- Scale and yieldThe recipe gives no yield; ten or twelve heads with a pint of brown sauce would serve roughly ten to twelve as a side or savoury course. For four people, three or four heads and about a cup of sauce is a reasonable proportion.
- What a head of celery means hereThe whole bunch, trimmed of leaves and coarse outer ribs; it may be split lengthwise or cut into shorter lengths to fit the pan. If the outer ribs are stringy, peel them with a vegetable peeler rather than discarding them.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned. Use a low-sodium chicken stock, since the braising liquid is reduced into the sauce and any salt in it concentrates.
- Brown sauceIn a kitchen of this kind, espagnole or a demi-glace rather than a quick pan gravy; note that espagnole is itself thickened with a brown roux. If you are buying rather than making, a good demi-glace base diluted to a pint is the closest equivalent.
- The hinge: reduce the two liquids togetherThe recipe directs that the half-pint of celery braising liquid be reduced into the brown sauce before the dish is sauced, which keeps the sauce from being thin and vegetal. Cook it down until it coats a spoon, then add the little sugar, likely there to offset celery's faint bitterness rather than to sweeten.
- Boiled marrowHave a butcher cut marrow bones into two-inch lengths, push out the marrow (soaking the bones in cold salted water overnight loosens it and draws out blood), then poach the pieces in barely simmering salted water for a few minutes until just set and opaque. Boiling hard melts them into fat.
- Blanching and braising timesTen minutes of blanching is right for whole heads. The braise then wants 25 to 40 minutes at a bare simmer, covered, until a knife slides through the base with no resistance; test rather than trust a clock, since celery varies.
- The toastCut thin, toasted dry and firm. Its job is to absorb the sauce without collapsing, so use a close-grained bread and assemble at the last moment.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronts this 1896 book, was cataloguing the repertoire of a grand New York hotel kitchen, and that repertoire, alongside a good deal of American and English matter, drew heavily on the French. Bone marrow served with a brown sauce is the classic French treatment usually labelled à la moelle, and pairing it with braised celery on toast places the dish in the family of savoury vegetable entrées that came between roast and sweet. Celery itself was a fashionable American luxury at the time: it was grown intensively in the muck fields of Michigan and around Kalamazoo, shipped east by rail, and set on well-off tables raw in tall cut-glass celery vases. Cooking a dozen heads down into a garnish, and dressing them with marrow and espagnole, was a way of showing that the hotel could afford to treat an expensive vegetable as a mere component.