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Poached Eggs, Celery Sauce
Cut four branches well cleaned white celery into very small square pieces; place in a saucepan with half pint water and half teaspoon salt and boil for twenty minutes. Mix in another pan one tablespoon butter with one and a half tablespoons flour. Add the celery and liquor, with half gill cream. Season with saltspoon cayenne pepper and half saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well for one minute and let boil for four minutes.
Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast pour over the sauce and serve.
A Victorian-style white sauce built on celery cooking liquor, spooned over poached eggs on toast. The measurements are mostly familiar; a few of the units and the roux method need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne is 1/4 tsp and the nutmeg 1/8 tsp for the whole batch. That is enough heat to notice across twelve eggs without dominating.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). Heavy cream gives the body the sauce is aiming for; half-and-half will thin it noticeably.
- Branches of celery"Branch" here means an individual rib, not a whole head. Four ribs diced small will give somewhere between one and two cups, depending on their size.
- The roux is the hingeThe recipe says only to mix butter and flour, but that paste needs to cook over low heat for a minute or two before the celery liquor goes in, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Add the hot liquid gradually and whisk, since a tablespoon of butter to one and a half of flour is a stiff, dry roux that lumps easily.
- Liquid volumeHalf a pint of water boiled twenty minutes will have reduced considerably; you may finish with well under a cup of liquor. Top up with water or light stock to reach about a cup of total liquid before adding cream, or the sauce will be a paste.
- Celery textureTwenty minutes leaves the dice fully soft, which is the period intention: the sauce should be smooth with tender flecks, not crunchy. If you want the celery to hold its shape, ten to twelve minutes is enough.
- PoachingBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and a loose yolk. Twelve eggs are best done in batches and held in warm water, then blotted before they go on the toast.
- YieldTwelve eggs on toast serves six as a lunch or supper dish, or twelve at breakfast with a single egg each.
Celery sauce belongs to the long nineteenth-century family of English white sauces, close cousins of onion sauce and bread sauce, and it turns up in period cookery most often alongside boiled fowl, turkey and rabbit. Celery itself was still something of a luxury in the period: the blanched white ribs called for here were the product of laborious earthing-up or boarding in the field, and the recipe specifies "well cleaned white celery" rather than the greener, tougher outer stalks. The nutmeg and cayenne pairing is a common finishing gesture in cream sauces of the era.