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Celery in Glass
Pare off the green stalks of one fine, large bunch of white, tender, crisp celery; neatly trim the roots, being careful to save the clear white hearts. Cut each stalk lengthwise into four equal branches. Wash them well in cold water and plunge in clean water with a piece of ice until ready to serve; then arrange them in a celery glass or a china radish dish, with a few pieces of ice in the centre, and serve.
This is a table preparation rather than a cooked dish, and nearly all of it hinges on one thing: cold water long enough to make the ribs snap. A few of the terms belong to a period when celery came to the table as a course in its own right.
- The hinge: the ice bathCelery goes crisp because the cut ribs take up water and the cells swell. Thirty minutes in ice water is the minimum for limp supermarket celery and an hour or two is better; drain and shake dry before it goes to the table or the dish pools.
- "Celery glass"A tall footed vase of cut or pressed glass, made specifically to stand ribs upright on the dinner table. Any narrow heavy tumbler or a small pitcher does the same job; the point is that the stalks stand up and the diner takes one by hand.
- "Pare off the green stalks"Nineteenth-century celery was banked with soil or boards to blanch it white, and the outer green ribs were coarse and often bitter. Modern Pascal celery is bred green and mild, so discard only ribs that are stringy or hollow and keep the rest.
- "Save the clear white hearts"The pale inner ribs and the leafy heart were the prize; some period directions keep them whole or merely split. Trim the root end into a flat base so the heart holds together as a single wedge.
- Cutting into fourRead as splitting each rib lengthwise, this suits the broad old blanched stalks (the phrase may equally mean quartering the whole head). Today's ribs are narrower; halving lengthwise, or leaving them whole, gives a piece of the same size in the hand.
- Ice in the dishIce among the stalks is called for here and in other recipes of the period, and still works, but it melts into the serving vessel. Chilling the glass and the celery separately keeps the dish dry.
- Yield and servingOne large bunch dressed this way will serve a small table as part of a relish course. Salt in a small dish alongside is the period accompaniment; olives, radishes and salted nuts were common companions.
Celery served raw and undressed was a fixture of formal American and English dinners through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, which is why a book of this vintage gives it an entry at all: it was a course, not a garnish. The white, tender stalks the recipe asks for came from plants blanched by banking earth or boards against the growing stems to keep light off them, a labor-intensive practice that made good celery a minor luxury and gave rise to purpose-made celery glasses and long, narrow celery dishes in pressed glass and china. Self-blanching and later green Pascal varieties gradually displaced the old banked types, and as celery got cheaper and milder the ceremonial glass on the table disappeared with it. The instruction to hold the stalks in iced water is the one part that survived into professional kitchens, where it is still how limp celery is revived.