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Stewed Celery
Trim a few heads of celery, and blanch them in boiling water, drain, and place them in cold water. Take them out when cold and drain all the water from them without squeezing. Place them in a pan with a little consomme or stock broth and one teaspoonful of moistened sugar, and allow them to stew for an hour and a half; then pour over them four tablespoonfuls of bechamel or veloute sauce; strain the whole through a strainer, and set in a bain-marie. When it is ready to serve, add to the sauce a little thick cream, which will enrich and make it white.
A classic French braise dressed in a white sauce, written for a brigade that had stock and mother sauces standing by. The instructions read oddly in places because the celery and the sauce are meant to be handled separately at the end.
- "A few heads"A head of celery is a whole bunch, not a rib. Two to three bunches, trimmed of leaves and coarse outer stalks and cut into 3-4 inch lengths, serves four to six as a side dish.
- Blanch and shockTwo to three minutes in well-salted boiling water, then straight into cold water. This sets the colour and pulls out the raw bitterness; drain it upside down in a colander rather than pressing, which crushes the ribs.
- Moistened sugarThe term is not certain: it may mean sugar dampened with a little water so it dissolved rather than scorching, or it may point to 'moist sugar', the period name for damp unrefined soft sugar. Either way, a teaspoon of granulated sugar does the same job, and it is there to round the celery's slight bitterness rather than to sweeten the dish.
- An hour and a half is too longAn hour and a half is probably longer than modern celery needs -- much of it is bred tenderer and less stringy than older varieties. Braised in enough stock to come halfway up, covered, at a bare simmer, it should be knife-tender in 30 to 40 minutes; held for the full 90 minutes it is likely to go stringy and watery.
- Bechamel or velouteBoth are flour-thickened mother sauces: bechamel on milk, veloute on white stock. Four tablespoons is a light coating, so make it fairly thick and thin it with the celery's braising liquid, which is where the flavour has gone.
- What gets strainedThe text says to strain 'the whole', which reads oddly; the likelier intention is to strain the sauce and keep the celery back. Reduce the braising liquid, whisk it into the sauce, pass that through a fine sieve, then return the celery to it.
- Bain-marieA water bath for holding, not cooking. A heatproof bowl set over barely simmering water keeps the sauce from skinning or splitting while the rest of the meal comes together.
- The cream at the endHeavy cream, stirred in off direct heat just before service. Added early it thins as the sauce reduces and loses the pale finish Oscar was after.
Stewed and braised celery was standard hotel vegetable cookery in the late nineteenth century, when celery was still a somewhat prestigious crop — grown in trenches and blanched, sold by the head, and set out raw in tall cut-glass celery vases as a course in its own right on American tables. Cooking it in stock and finishing it with a white sauce is straightforwardly French technique, the same treatment given to cardoons, endive and lettuce in the repertoire Oscar Tschirky worked from at the Waldorf. The recipe assumes what a hotel kitchen always had and a home kitchen rarely does: consomme on hand, a mother sauce already made, and a bain-marie holding a dozen things at once until the dining room called for them.