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Cream of Celery
Trim off all the green parts of three heads of celery. Cut them up in very small pieces, then thoroughly wash in fresh water and drain well on a sieve. Place the celery in a medium-sized pan with half sliced carrot, two sliced leeks and one medium, sliced white onion. Moisten with two quarts cold water. Season with a light tablespoon salt and a teaspoon white pepper; if any chicken or veal bones are at hand add them to the saucepan. Cover the pan and let boil rather slowly for forty-five minutes; strain the broth into a basin and keep hot.
Place all ingredients except the bones in a mortar and pound to a paste, then add to the strained broth. Heat one ounce melted butter in a saucepan, pour in two and a half ounces sifted flour, briskly stir with a wooden spoon for two minutes; then drop in the celery broth, mix lightly while cooking for five minutes; add a pint good hot milk, one gill cream, half ounce good butter and one saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well with a wooden spoon until it comes to a boiling point, then add one gill cream. Mix well while heating for two minutes, but do not allow to boil again. Pass the cream through a small sieve, then through a Chinese strainer into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A classic French-style cream soup built on a vegetable broth, thickened with a white roux and finished with milk and cream. Most of the work is straightforward; the archaic quantities and the pounding step are what need translating.
- Do not boil after the cream goes inThe final gill of cream is added off the boil and heated for two minutes only. The recipe is explicit that it must not boil again; hard boiling risks splitting the milk and cream.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is a quarter pint: 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American measure, 5 fl oz in imperial, so the two additions come to roughly a cup of cream. A saltspoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon.
- Three heads of celeryA "head" is the whole bunch, not a rib. Three bunches trimmed of all green tops leave a couple of pounds or so of pale stalks, depending on the size of the heads: a great deal of celery for two quarts of water, and what carries the flavour.
- The mortar stepPounding the cooked vegetables to a paste is what a blender does in thirty seconds. Purée the strained solids with a ladle of the hot broth, then return them; the sieving at the end removes the celery strings that the pounding leaves behind.
- Ounces are weight, not volumeOne ounce of butter is two tablespoons; two and a half ounces of sifted flour is a generous half cup. Note that there is far more flour than butter here, so the roux will be dry rather than loose. Thin the soup with extra broth or milk if it comes out thicker than you want.
- SaltA light tablespoon of salt into two quarts of water, before the liquid reduces and before any bones are added, runs high by modern habit. Season at half that and correct at the end, especially if you use commercial stock in place of the bones.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Passing through an ordinary fine sieve twice, pressing with a ladle, achieves the same smoothness.
- YieldThe finished soup runs to roughly two and a half quarts, enough for six to eight as a first course.
Cream soups of this construction — a vegetable simmered in water with leek, onion and carrot, puréed, then bound with a white roux and let down with milk and cream — follow the *velouté* and *crème* formulas of the nineteenth-century French professional kitchen, and they arrive in English-language books like this one largely unaltered, mortar and chinois included. Celery of the period was commonly blanched: grown in trenches, or in self-blanching varieties, to keep the stalks pale and mild, which may be part of why the recipe begins by discarding all the green. The instruction to add chicken or veal bones "if any are at hand" suggests a kitchen where stock was a by-product of other cooking, though the recipe alone cannot tell us how general that was.