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Cream of Celery
Boil a trimmed head of celery in one pint of water for thirty or forty minutes; boil a piece of mace and a large slice of onion in one pint of milk; mix one tablespoonful of flour with two tablespoonfuls of cold milk, add this to the boiling milk, and cook for ten minutes. Mash celery in the water in which it has been cooked, mix it into the boiling milk, add one tablespoonful of butter and season with pepper and salt to taste. Strain and serve immediately. The flavor may be improved by adding one teacupful of whipped cream when the soup is in the tureen.
A straightforward turn-of-the-century cream soup, thickened with a milk-and-flour slurry rather than a roux. A few conventions need translating.
- Head of celeryAt this period this means a whole bunch, roots trimmed and leaves reserved, not a single rib. Figure roughly 1 to 1.25 lb of trimmed stalks; the leaves add a good deal of flavour to the cooking water.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground. A blade or two is what is meant here. Ground nutmeg is the nearest substitute, used sparingly, but it will not strain out.
- TeacupfulPeriod teacups varied; reckon somewhere between a gill (4 fl oz) and 6 fl oz, less than a modern measuring cup. Whip the cream to soft peaks and fold it in at the tureen so it does not deflate.
- Thirty or forty minutesThat is long enough to reduce the pint of cooking water considerably and to cook the celery to complete collapse, which is the point here since it gets mashed and strained. Keep the lid on and top up with a little water if it threatens to go dry.
- Scald the milk gentlyInfusing mace and onion in milk over direct heat scorches easily. Bring it barely to a shiver, hold it off the heat while it steeps, then return it to the boil when you add the flour slurry.
- Cook out the flourThe ten minutes after adding the slurry is not padding. Less than that and the soup carries a raw, pasty taste that the strainer will not remove.
- StrainWith the mace blade and onion slice still in the pot, straining is compulsory rather than optional. A food mill or blender before straining will get far more celery through and give a fuller body than mashing by hand.
- YieldSomewhat under a quart once the water has reduced and the solids are strained out, serving three or four as a first course. It thickens as it stands, so thin with a little milk if held.
Cream soups built on a single vegetable were a fixture of the American hotel dining room in the 1890s. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, gathered this and hundreds of similar formulas into his 1896 Cook Book, a volume aimed as much at the ambitious home cook as at the trade. The technique here has flour slaked in cold milk and stirred into hot, a method inherited from English white-sauce practice. Mace as the seasoning for a white soup was near-universal in nineteenth-century cookery, valued because it perfumes without staining the pale colour of the dish.