No. 444

Celery Sauce

Sauce au Celeri

Have half a pound of white celery stalks cut in quarter inch pieces, put them in boiling and salted water for five minutes, drain and place them in a saucepan with a pint of white stock (No. 422), then reduce it to half, adding a pint of well-reduced veloute (No. 415), and just when ready to serve, incorporate into it two ounces of fine butter and half a gill of fresh cream, seasoning with salt, nutmeg and red pepper.

← No. 443 Castillane Sauce Hot Sauces No. 445 Champagne Sauce, Also with Chablis, Rhine Wi →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French velouté derivative, written for a brigade that already had stock and sauce on the stove. The work is mostly in the two component sauces the number references point to.

The hinge: finish off the heatThe butter and cream go in "just when ready to serve." Pull the pan from the burner, swirl the butter in a piece at a time, then the cream. Boiling after that point breaks the emulsion and the sauce turns greasy and thin.
Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup (60 ml). The pint measures are US pints, 2 cups each.
White stock and veloutéNo. 422 is the book's white stock; No. 415 its velouté, that stock thickened with a white roux and simmered smooth. A good unsalted chicken stock and a well-cooked blond roux sauce stand in directly. "Well-reduced" means the velouté should coat a spoon before it goes in.
Red pepperNineteenth-century American cookbooks use "red pepper" for cayenne. A pinch, enough to sharpen rather than to be tasted.
The celeryHalf a pound is roughly four or five inner stalks, strings pulled. The five-minute blanch takes off the raw edge; the celery then finishes as the stock reduces.
Strain or don'tRanhofer leaves the pieces in, which gives a garnish sauce. For a smooth sauce, pass it through a fine sieve or blend it before the butter and cream go in.
Yield and useRoughly three cups once the stock has been reduced and the velouté added, enough for six or more. It belongs with boiled or poached poultry, veal, and blanched sweetbreads.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and the numbering system here is the point of the book: it is a cross-referenced professional manual, not a domestic cookbook, and No. 444 assumes you have already made Nos. 415 and 422. Celery sauce itself was well established on both sides of the Atlantic by then, appearing in English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, usually as an accompaniment to boiled fowl or turkey. Its persistence has a good deal to do with celery's status in the period: the blanched, self-bleaching varieties grown in trenched beds were a costly winter luxury, served upright in cut-glass celery vases on American tables.