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Celery, Braise
Place a small mirepoix in a roasting pan, with one ounce melted butter. Let the mirepoix get a nice light brown, then lay six stalks fine, well-cleaned white celery over the vegetables. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; pour in hot water or broth to nearly cover the celery. Briskly boil for five minutes on the range. Cover the celery with a sheet of buttered paper. Set the pan in the oven for forty minutes. Remove, dress the celery on a hot dish and serve.
N. B. Place the remaining mirepoix into the demi-glace pot.
A classic braise from the professional kitchen, written in the shorthand of a hotel cook who assumed a stockpot and a sauce station were already going. Two words need translating before anything else: stalk and mirepoix.
- "Six stalks" means six heads"Six stalks" probably means six heads -- In older usage a stalk of celery often meant the whole head, what a supermarket sells as a bunch, with the individual ribs distinguished separately (the French cookery term is celery en branches). Read that way, six trimmed heads suits a vegetable course for a table of several; read as six single ribs, the quantity looks lost in a roasting pan.
- MirepoixDiced carrot, onion and celery trimmings, sometimes with a little bacon or ham, cut small and cooked in butter until lightly coloured. Roughly a cup total for this quantity, and it is a flavour bed here rather than an ingredient to be served.
- Prepare the celery firstTrim the heads to about six inches, split large ones lengthwise, and wash between the ribs where grit collects. Many kitchens blanched the heads two or three minutes in salted water first to soften the outer ribs and draw off bitterness; the recipe's brisk five-minute boil in the pan does the same work.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names none. For a covered braise of this kind a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, is a reasonable modern setting. Forty minutes should leave a knife slipping easily through the base of the heart; older, thicker celery may want an hour.
- The buttered paperA cartouche: a sheet of parchment cut to the pan, buttered on the underside, laid directly on the vegetables. It keeps the exposed tops from drying while allowing the liquid to reduce, which a tight lid will not do. Modern parchment stands in for the original paper well enough.
- White pepper, and whyWhite rather than black is deliberate in a pale braise, where black flecks were considered a fault in presentation. Judge the half teaspoon against however much celery you have actually put in the pan, and season to taste.
- The braising liquidBroth gives a far better result than water. When the celery comes out, strain the pan liquid, reduce it hard, and spoon it over the heads instead of serving them plain on a hot dish.
- The demi-glace noteInstruction for a restaurant brigade with a running sauce pot; the spent mirepoix went back to enrich it. At home the strained vegetables and liquid can go into a stock or soup pot, or simply be discarded.
Braised celery belongs to the French repertoire of légumes braisés that professional kitchens applied to lettuce, endive, cabbage and celery alike: a bed of aromatics, a shallow braising liquid, a paper cover, a slow oven. The untranslated words mirepoix and demi-glace, and the assumption of a running sauce pot, place this in a kitchen working in French terms. Celery itself was a prestige vegetable in this period; blanched white heads were expensive enough to be set out in cut-glass celery vases on the dinner table as a display, and the trade around Kalamazoo, Michigan, made "Michigan celery" a recognised market name. Treating whole heads as a cooked course rather than a raw relish was a way of putting that value on the plate.