No. 2721

Celery Stalks with half-Glaze, Espagnole and Marrow, or Veloute Sauce (pieds de Celeri a la Demi-Glace a la Sauce Espagnole a la Moelle Ou au Veloute

Suppress the outer hard stalks from eight or ten tender, but not too large celery heads; cut the remainder into four or five-inch lengths and pare the roots to a point. Wash them carefully and blanch for twenty minutes; refresh and range them in a saucepan to cover with unskimmed broth (No. 194a); lay a buttered paper or a thin slice of fat pork on the top and cook very slowly. Drain, wipe well, pare and dress them on a dish; mask over entirely with a half-glaze sauce (No. 413) reduced with Madeira wine, or else an espagnole sauce (No. 414) with marrow, or a veloute sauce (No. 415) reduced with mushroom essence (No. 392) and buttered when ready to serve.

← No. 2720 Celery with Bechamel and Croutons Celery, Onions & Leeks No. 2722 Celeriac Mirabeau or a la Villeroi →

For the Modern Kitchen

A braised celery side dish from Ranhofer's kitchen, written for cooks who already had stock, demi-glace and velouté on the stove. The work is mostly in the braise; the sauce is assumed to exist.

What a "celery head" isA head here is a whole bunch, not a rib. Eight or ten bunches with the coarse outer ribs stripped away makes a large platter; two or three bunches scale the dish down without changing the method.
Blanching timeTwenty minutes is a long blanch by modern standards; modern hearts are more tender and will likely need only five to eight minutes in boiling water, enough to take the raw edge off before braising. "Refresh" means plunge into cold water to stop the cooking and set the colour.
Unskimmed brothNo. 194a is one of the book's numbered broths, used here with its fat left on rather than skimmed off; the fat sits on the surface and bastes the celery as it cooks. A good unsalted stock with a spoonful or two of butter or rendered fat added does the same job.
The buttered paperThis is a cartouche: a round of parchment buttered on the underside, laid directly on the celery. The thin slice of fat pork is the alternative, and it seasons as it melts. The recipe has the broth covering the celery.
"Cook very slowly"A bare tremble, not a simmer; celery braised at a rolling boil falls apart into strings. Keep it just under bubbling until a knife tip meets no resistance at the root end.
The three saucesDemi-glace (No. 413) reduced with Madeira, espagnole (No. 414) finished with poached beef marrow, or velouté (No. 415) reduced with mushroom essence and buttered off the heat. All three are separate recipes elsewhere in the book; without them the dish does not exist, so choose one and have it hot before the celery is drained.
Marrow and mushroom essenceMarrow means beef marrow soaked, poached gently in salted water until translucent, then sliced and folded in at the last moment so it does not melt away. Mushroom essence is simply the strained cooking liquor of mushrooms reduced to a syrup — a concentrated mushroom stock will stand in.
Draining matters"Drain, wipe well" is not fussiness. Braising liquid clinging to the stalks will thin a demi-glace or velouté on the plate and the mask will slide off. Blot the pieces dry, trim the ends square, then sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how his book works: a short paragraph of instruction resting on a scaffold of numbered mother sauces and stocks kept going daily in a professional brigade. Braised celery served under a brown or white sauce was standard French garniture of the period — celery was a prestige vegetable in nineteenth-century America, grown in trenched and blanched beds, sold by the bunch with the root still attached, and often set out raw in tall cut-glass celery vases as a mark of a well-appointed table. The instruction to pare the root to a point is a reminder that presentation was half the dish.