No. 779

Celery Stalks, Celery, Fennel, Celery Hearts, Celery Knobs, with Vinaigrette Mayonnaise

Celeri en Branches, Celeri, Fenouil, Celeri Rave, Vinaigrette Mayonnaise

For Celery Stalks.—Have some good heads seven inches long; remove the outer leaves until the fine, tender, yellow ones are reached, then clean them by cutting off all the hard parts; split the stalks into four, and make a few slight incisions on their length; throw them at once into cold water, and all those parts that are notched will curl outward, giving the celery a beautiful appearance. They are either served in side dishes or else in high glass stands.

For Celery, Fennel, Celery Hearts.—Pare these well, wipe them on a cloth, and lay them on side dishes; serve at the same time, anchovies pounded and pressed through a sieve diluted with warm oil. English people eat celery with the cheese, the Italians eat fennel at the end of the repast.

For Celery Knobs, with Vinaigrette Mayonnaise.—For vinaigrette, wash the knob, and put it to cook in boiling, salted water, refresh it, and cut it up into slices, from these remove some round pieces with a vegetable cutter one and three-quarters to two inches in diameter, and lay them on a deep dish to marinate in oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Two hours later, drain them off, and mix them in some mayonnaise; lay them in a line on a side dish and surround them with anchovy fillets. Decorate with pounded hard boiled egg-yolks rubbed through a sieve, mixing in half the same quantity of mayonnaise, and push this through a cornet; lay tarragon leaves on the outside, and throw over some finely chopped chervil. If very tender cut in thin slices after being peeled; season with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar, and cover with a mayonnaise sauce.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Three separate cold hors-d'oeuvre preparations sharing one entry, all of them assembly work rather than cooking. The only item needing heat is the celery knob.

Celery knob is celeriacSold as celeriac or celery root: a knobbly brown sphere the size of a grapefruit. Peel deeply with a knife rather than a peeler, since the outer layer is fibrous and often hollowed by soil.
Cooking the celeriacRanhofer gives no time. A whole medium root in boiling salted water runs 30 to 45 minutes until a skewer meets no resistance; slices take 10 to 15. Overcooked celeriac collapses when you punch out the rounds, so err short. Hold peeled or cut pieces in acidulated water, as it browns as fast as an apple.
"Refresh"Plunge into cold water immediately after boiling to stop the cooking and cool the root enough to handle. Drain and dry thoroughly before the marinade, or the oil and vinegar will slide off.
The curling trickThe lengthwise incisions curl outward in cold water, as the recipe says; the colder the water and the longer the soak, the more pronounced the curl. It works best on stalks that still have some rigidity.
Celery has changedThe book assumes blanched celery, grown banked with soil so the heart came up pale yellow and mild. Modern Pascal celery is green, stringier and more assertive. Peel the outer ribs with a vegetable peeler to remove the strings, and use the pale inner heart where the recipe calls for tender yellow leaves.
Fennel here means the bulbFlorence fennel (finocchio), not the herb or the seed. Trim the base, halve, remove the core if woody, and slice thin; the fronds are worth keeping for the plate.
The anchovy dipSalt-packed anchovies pounded to a paste and let down with warm -- not hot -- oil, as the recipe specifies; dilute to taste until the sauce coats a celery stalk without dripping. Modern oil-packed fillets need no soaking; salt-packed ones do.
CornetA cone rolled from parchment or paper, used for fine decorative piping alongside the cloth pastry bags of the period. Any small piping bag with a plain or fine tip does the same job for the sieved yolk-and-mayonnaise mixture.
YieldNo quantities are given. Each preparation is meant as one item among several on a cold table, and the number of rounds you get from a single celeriac will depend on its size and the cutter used.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the cold side dish at its most literal: raw vegetables, arranged. Celery was a prestige crop in late nineteenth-century America — labour-intensive to blanch, expensive, and served upright in the tall pressed-glass celery vases that Ranhofer calls "high glass stands," which is why so many survive in antique shops. His two national asides are accurate observations of the period rather than invention: celery alongside cheese was a fixture of the English dinner, and fennel eaten plain at the close of a meal, as a digestive, is a habit still traceable in Italy. Celery knob, meanwhile, was a Continental vegetable that Ranhofer would have known from his French training; celeriac never took hold in American home cooking to the degree it did in France and Germany, and it remains the least familiar item on this page.