Home › Soups › Celery Cream Soup
Celery Cream Soup
Boil a small cup rice in three pints milk, until it will pass through a sieve. Grate the white part of two heads of celery (three if small) on a bread-grater; add this to the rice milk after it has been strained; put to it a quart of strong white stock; let boil until celery is perfectly tender; season with salt and cayenne, and serve. If cream is obtainable, substitute one pint for the same quantity of milk.
A late-nineteenth-century purée soup thickened with rice rather than flour or potato. The method is sound; the only real work is keeping the rice-and-milk base from scorching.
- Quantities in modern termsA "small cup" of rice is probably somewhere near 1/2 to 2/3 cup uncooked, though the measure is imprecise; three pints of milk is 6 cups, and a quart of stock is 4 cups. The finished volume would serve roughly six to eight as a first course.
- The hinge: milk over low heatRice simmered in milk long enough to break down will catch and scorch the instant the bottom of the pan gets ahead of you. Use a heavy pan over the lowest workable heat, stir often, or set the pan inside a larger pan of simmering water.
- White stock"Strong white stock" means an unroasted veal or chicken stock, ideally one gelatinous enough to set when cold. A good unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily browned, which will muddy the colour.
- Grating the celeryGrating raw celery on a bread grater was the era's way of getting fine shreds without a food processor. Slicing it very thin, or pulsing it in a processor, gives the same result; either way keep to the pale inner ribs, since the dark outer stalks are stringy and bitter.
- Heads of celeryTwo "heads" means two whole bunches, not two ribs. The white part of two bunches will give roughly 3 to 4 cups shredded, depending on the size of the heads.
- Sieving"until it will pass through a sieve" is the test for doneness, not a separate step from the straining that follows. Press the rice and milk through a fine sieve, or blend it smooth and then sieve it.
- Second cookingOnce the stock and celery go in, 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer is enough for the celery to turn tender. Longer boiling dulls the fresh celery flavour, which is the whole point of the soup.
- SeasoningCayenne here is a whisper, not heat — a pinch in the whole pot. Salt at the end, since a reduced stock concentrates as it cooks.
Cream soups built on rice rather than roux are often said to have been common in American and English cookery of the 1870s and 80s: rice was cheap, it passed through a sieve into a smooth body, and it left no raw-flour taste. The Dixie Cook Book, first issued in the early 1880s and reprinted for decades, gathered contributions from Southern housekeepers alongside a good deal of material borrowed from Northern and English sources. The line "if cream is obtainable" is the telling detail: it assumes a household with dairy on hand but no certainty of it, and the whole recipe is written so that whole milk alone will still produce something worth serving. Celery itself was a comparative luxury in that period, sold in tall glass vases at the table as a show vegetable, and the pale blanched inner heart specified here was the prized part.