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Celery, Genevoise
Remove stale branches and leaves from three roots fine, fresh, crisp celery, detach branches, thoroughly wash and wipe, then cut in inch pieces. Place them in a saucepan with a two-ounce piece salt pork, white onion with two cloves stuck in it, pint broth, gill water, teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, boil for forty-five minutes, then take up pork and onions. Mix in a saucepan an ounce butter and one and a half ounces flour, strain in celery broth and sharply mix until it comes to a boil. Add celery with a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and let boil for ten minutes. Transfer celery, etc., to baking dish, sprinkle a little Swiss cheese over, set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A braised celery gratin built on a velouté made from the braising liquid. Nothing here is unsafe, but the vocabulary and the timings both need translating.
- "Three roots" of celeryRoot here means the whole head or bunch, not celeriac. Three heads is a large amount for a side dish; two will fill a standard gratin dish comfortably.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons of pepper is three-quarters of a teaspoon, and the cayenne and nutmeg are a quarter teaspoon each.
- Salt, twice overBetween the salt pork, a pint of broth and the added teaspoon of salt, this seasons aggressively by modern standards. If the broth is homemade and unsalted the teaspoon makes more sense; with commercial stock, hold the added salt back and correct at the end.
- Forty-five minutes is a long braiseInch-cut celery is generally tender in 15 to 20 minutes and goes stringy and watery well before three-quarters of an hour. The long boil would also have reduced and concentrated the broth; taste at twenty minutes and lift the celery out if it is done, letting the liquid keep reducing.
- The sauceAn ounce of butter to an ounce and a half of flour is a stiff roux, thickening roughly a pint of strained liquid to a coating velouté. Cook it a minute or two before straining in the hot broth, and whisk rather than stir or it will lump.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Everything going into the dish is already cooked, so this is a browning step: 425F for ten minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler, will colour the cheese without drying the sauce.
- Swiss cheeseIn a 1906 American book this means Emmental or Gruyère. Gruyère browns better and has more character against the nutmeg and cayenne.
- Salt porkA two-ounce piece of unsmoked cured pork belly, used for flavour and discarded. Pancetta or a piece of bacon works; smoked bacon will change the dish noticeably.
- YieldFour to six as a vegetable course alongside roast meat.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), the work of a Delmonico's chef who set out to file the world's dishes under national labels. In classical French cookery genevoise normally denotes a rich fish sauce associated with Geneva, so the name attached here is doing something looser: Switzerland appears to be invoked chiefly by the Swiss cheese scattered over the top before browning. The dish itself is thoroughly French in method, a braise in stock finished as a velouté and gratinated. Celery was a comparatively prestigious vegetable in nineteenth-century America, served in glass celery vases at table and eaten raw as a first course, so cooking three whole heads down into a gratin was a fairly generous gesture.