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Celery Sauce
Mrs. J. B. L.
Mix two tablespoons of flour with half a teacup of butter; have ready a pint of boiling milk; stir the flour and butter into the milk; take three heads of celery, cut into small bits, and boil for a few minutes in water, which strain off; put the celery into the melted butter and keep it stirred over the fire for five or ten minutes. This is very nice with boiled fowl or turkey.
A plain white sauce enriched with blanched celery, meant for the carving platter rather than the plate. Two things need attention: the fat-to-flour ratio and the amount of celery.
- The butter is out of proportionHalf a teacup is about 3 fl oz, or 6 tablespoons, against only 2 tablespoons of flour. That is roughly three times the fat a modern roux uses, and the sauce is liable to separate into a greasy pool. Use 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour for a pint of milk.
- Teacup and tablespoonA nineteenth-century teacup generally runs 5 to 6 fl oz, not the 8 oz of a modern measuring cup. Period tablespoons varied and may have been slightly larger than today's, though not enough to matter here.
- Three heads of celeryA head is the entire bunch, and market celery today tends to be larger and less stringy than the blanched winter celery of the 1870s. One bunch, or about 3 cups of diced inner stalks and heart, is ample for a pint of sauce.
- Blanch, then finish in the sauceThe brief boil in water and the straining are not just tidiness: they soften the celery and mellow the flavour of coarse outer stalks. Drain well, or the water thins the finished sauce.
- Cook the flour firstThe instruction to stir flour and butter into boiling milk invites lumps. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two, then add the hot milk gradually.
- Seasoning is assumed, not statedAdd salt and white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg if you like; the recipe specifies no seasoning at all. A spoonful of cream at the end is an optional enrichment.
- YieldA pint of milk plus the butter and celery makes appreciably more than a pint of finished sauce, enough for a boiled fowl or a small turkey.
Celery sauce was one of the standard English accompaniments to boiled poultry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, appearing alongside bread sauce and egg sauce; boiled fowl was mild by design, and the sauce carried the flavour. The pale, tender stalks the recipe assumes were produced by earthing up or otherwise excluding light from the growing plant, a labour-intensive practice that made good celery a winter luxury. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions credited to local women -- often, as here, by initials only -- is full of these attributed household sauces, recipes that circulated by exchange between kitchens long before they were printed.