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Potage, Knot Celery
Peel and finely slice three roots knot celery, place in saucepan with a sliced onion, two sliced leeks, two branches parsley, a branch chervil, two bay leaves, two sliced, cold, peeled raw potatoes and two ounces raw ham cut in small pieces. Moisten with two quarts broth and quart water, season with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, saltspoon nutmeg, and lightly mix. Cover pan, let gently boil for one and a half hours, press soup through sieve into a vessel, then through Chinese strainer into another saucepan. Set pan on fire, add two gills milk, half a gill cream and half ounce butter; mix well, then let boil for five minutes, place bread croutons in soup tureen, pour soup over and serve.
A straightforward French-style purée soup: root vegetables simmered in broth, sieved twice, then enriched with milk, cream and butter. Only the vocabulary really dates it.
- Knot celery is celeriacAlso sold as celery root or knob celery. Three roots means roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb before peeling; the skin is thick and gnarled and is best cut away with a knife rather than a peeler.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills milk is 1 cup and half a gill cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, here of grated nutmeg.
- The Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. The first pass through an ordinary sieve breaks down the vegetables; the second catches celeriac fibre and leek strings, which is what separates this from a rustic purée. A blender plus one pass through fine mesh gets you to the same place.
- The ham is seasoning, not meatTwo ounces of raw ham most likely means uncooked cured ham of the prosciutto or country-ham type. Its salt and savour go into the broth and the solids are strained out. Account for it before adding the teaspoon of salt, and taste again at the end.
- Keep the boil gentleAn hour and a half at a bare simmer is right for extracting flavour; a hard boil will reduce the liquid too far and leave the pur"5,"verdict":"hedge -- see replacement below
- Five minutes after the dairyThe recipe says to let the soup boil five minutes once the milk and cream go in; a bare simmer is the safer reading, since prolonged boiling after enrichment risks catching on the pan bottom and dulling the cream.
- Chervil and bayChervil wilts fast and is hard to find; flat parsley with a pinch of tarragon approximates it. Fish out the bay leaves before sieving if you want no bitterness in the purée.
- YieldThree quarts of liquid at the start, in a covered pan at a gentle boil, loses comparatively little, and the dairy is added after; expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 quarts of finished soup, enough for eight or so as a first course. Put the croutons in the tureen at the last moment so they do not sink.
Celeriac was established as a garden vegetable in French and German kitchens well before it was common in American ones, and nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks call it variously knob celery, turnip-rooted celery, or, as here, knot celery — all names for the same continental root. In French usage potage is the general word for soup rather than a technical term for a sieved and dairy-finished one; it is the potage purée specifically that is passed through a sieve, as this one is, in contrast to a clear consommé. The double straining, the gills and saltspoons and the 'Chinese strainer' all point to professional American hotel cookery of the French school around the turn of the twentieth century.