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Celery Soup
Take the tough stalks, leaves, and roots of any celery. Wash carefully, cut in small pieces, cover with about three cups of slightly salted boiling water, and cook until very soft. Pass all through a wire sieve. There should be two cups of pulp and liquid. Scald two cups of milk in a double boiler with one slice of onion. Strain and use this in making two cups white sauce No. I (see page 67). Add the celery mixture to this, and heat all together, but do not boil. Serve very hot with croutons (see page 149).
A thrift soup built on the parts of a celery head most cooks discard. Nothing here is difficult, but two details — the strength of the white sauce and the ban on boiling — decide whether it tastes like soup or like wallpaper paste.
- Do not let it boilOnce the celery pur instead hold it just below a simmer. Vegetable pur es can curdle a milk sauce if it is boiled, and a flour-thickened milk base scorches on the bottom the moment it catches. A double boiler or very low heat with frequent stirring is the safe route.
- White sauce No. IIn comparable books of the period No. I is usually the thin sauce: about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour per cup of milk, cooked a minute or two before the milk goes in, which would make roughly 2 tablespoons each for two cups. Check page 67 before you commit — a thicker roux turns this into a paste once the celery pulp is added.
- "Roots" means the base, not celeriacThe recipe is talking about the trimmed root end of an ordinary bunch of celery, along with the coarse outer ribs and the leafy tops. Celeriac is a different vegetable and would make a much sweeter, starchier soup. Split the root end and wash it hard — grit hides in the crevices.
- Go easy on the leavesA generous handful of celery leaves gives depth; a whole bunch's worth gives a green bitterness that the milk cannot cover. If your tops are dark and coarse, use half.
- The sieveA wire sieve and a wooden spoon still works, but a blender followed by a sieve is faster and gives a smoother result. The sieving is not optional — celery is stringy and the fibres will not break down no matter how long you cook them.
- Scalding the milk with onionHeat the milk with one thin slice of onion until it steams and shows bubbles at the edge, then strain the onion out. It is a mild infusion, not a flavour you should be able to name in the finished soup.
- SeasoningThe original salts only the cooking water. The finished soup wants salt, white pepper and, if you like, a scrape of nutmeg — taste it hot, since milk soups read as underseasoned when cool.
- YieldAbout four cups, since the recipe makes two cups of pulp and liquid plus two cups of sauce: three or four first courses. It thickens as it stands, so hold back a little milk if you are making it ahead.
The Cook Book of Left Overs belongs to a genre that flourished in American and British kitchens either side of 1900, when domestic-science writers turned household thrift into a teachable system rather than a matter of instinct. Celery was the natural subject for such a chapter: sold by the head with root, tops and coarse outer ribs attached, it arrived on the table as a raw relish — the celery glass on the dinner table was a fixture of late-Victorian service — and it was generally the pale tender hearts that were thought best suited to it. That left most of the plant behind, which is precisely what this soup exists to use. The method itself is the standard cream-soup formula of the period, common to the domestic-science literature generally: a vegetable purée let down with a thin white sauce, the milk first infused with onion. Dozens of soups in these books differ only in the vegetable, and the croutons at the end are the usual finish, themselves generally made from bread past its best.