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Serving Celery in a Glass
Thoroughly wash two or three heads of fine white celery, pare off the green stalks and trim the roots, being careful to save the clear white hearts. Cut every head lengthwise into quarters, rinse them again in cold water, and let them remain in a dish of clean ice water until required. Arrange them in a celery stand, or glass or dress on a china dish, with a few pieces of ice in the center, and serve.
A preparation rather than a cooked dish, and the whole point of it is texture: celery served cold, wet and rigid. Two details carry the result.
- The ice water is the recipeCelery goes limp because its cells lose turgor, and a soak in ice water pulls it back. The recipe says only to leave it in the ice water "until required", so give it a proper soak rather than a quick rinse, and keep the water genuinely iced rather than merely cold.
- "Fine white celery" is not what you buy nowOscar meant blanched celery, grown banked up with soil or boards so the stalks stayed pale, stringless and mild. Standard supermarket celery is green Pascal, stronger flavoured and tougher; use the pale inner heart, or look for celery sold as blanched or self-blanching.
- Pare off the green stalksThe green outer ribs are trimmed away for this dish; the recipe does not say what became of them, but they are better kept for stock than for the table.
- StringsBlanched celery tended to be the more tender; modern green celery is often noticeably stringy. Run a peeler or a paring knife down the convex side of each rib to lift the coarse fibres before the final soak.
- A celery stand or glassA footed cut-glass vase, tall and narrow, which held the quarters upright like a bouquet. Any heavy straight-sided tumbler or small pitcher does the same job; the weight matters so it does not tip.
- Ice in the centreThe recipe sets a few pieces of ice in the centre with the quarters arranged around it, so the pieces stay upright and the meltwater drains rather than pooling. Drain the stand once before it reaches the table.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield beyond "two or three heads". Salt in a small dish alongside is the period accompaniment; the celery itself is unseasoned.
Celery on the dinner table as a cold raw relish, rather than as a stewed vegetable or a soup base, was a mark of a well-set nineteenth-century table on both sides of the Atlantic, and the purpose-made celery glass — tall, footed, often cut — is a common survivor in antique shops. The pale stalks Oscar specifies were the product of blanching, a labour-intensive field practice of banking soil or wrapping paper around the growing plants to exclude light; blanched celery was correspondingly expensive, and it was displayed upright in glass rather than simply heaped on a plate. Pascal celery, the green everyday type, is generally traced to the last years of the nineteenth century and gradually displaced the blanched sorts as the market moved toward hardiness and shipping. That this instruction appears at all in a Waldorf book says something about what a hotel kitchen was expected to teach: the trimming, the second rinse, the ice water and the arrangement were the entire skill, and getting them right was the difference between a garnish and a course.