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Celery Toast
Take the outer and less tender stalks of celery that are often thrown away, cut them into half-inch pieces, and cook in very slightly salted water until tender. Drain and use one-half cup of this water and one-half cup of milk to make a white sauce No. 2 (see page 68). Add the celery to the sauce, and pour over slices of nicely browned and buttered toast. Serve very hot.
A straightforward creamed-vegetable dish that turns the tough outer ribs of a celery head into supper. Two things need translating: the sauce reference and the fact that stringy outer stalks want more preparation than the original admits.
- White sauce No. 2Numbered white sauces in books of this kind generally run from thin to thick, so No. 2 is most likely the medium or standard one, commonly about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together and whisked into 1 cup of liquid; page 68 will give this book's own proportions. Here the liquid is the half cup of celery cooking water plus half a cup of milk, which is why the cooking water is worth saving.
- String the outer stalksThe outer ribs of celery carry heavy fibres that boiling does not dissolve. Run a peeler or the back of a knife down the convex side and strip them before cutting, or the pieces stay unpleasantly thread-like in the sauce.
- Cooking timeHalf-inch pieces of outer celery need roughly 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer to go tender; older, thicker ribs sit at the top of that range. Test with a knife tip rather than a clock.
- Salt the water lightly, as instructedThe instruction to salt "very slightly" is deliberate: half a cup of that water goes straight into the sauce. Season the finished sauce at the end instead.
- The toastThick-cut bread, well browned and buttered while hot, holds up to the sauce. Thin sandwich bread collapses within a minute of the sauce hitting it, so assemble and serve immediately.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of celery, so any yield is a guess; the sauce is built on 1 cup of liquid, which will dress roughly two slices of toast as a light supper. Scale the sauce at 1 cup liquid to 2 tablespoons each butter and flour.
- Worth addingA grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of grated cheese stirred into the finished sauce is entirely in period and lifts what is otherwise a very plain dish.
Creamed vegetables on toast were a fixture of American and British household cooking from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth, when a flour-and-milk white sauce was the standard way to stretch a small quantity of anything into a meal. Celery in this era was sold as a whole bunched head, often blanched pale, and the tender heart was reserved for the relish dish that appeared on formal tables; the coarse green outer ribs were exactly what a thrift-minded cookbook would notice going into the bin. Recipes of this kind recall the books of left-overs that are often said to have flourished around the First World War and again in the Depression, when domestic-science writers pressed household economy as a matter of both budget and duty. The instruction to keep the cooking water is the same reflex that turns up throughout the genre: flavour and, as they then understood it, nourishment were held to leach into the pot liquor and ought not to be poured away.