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Souffle of Celery
Thoroughly wash and drain two stalks fresh, crisp celery, remove green leaves and finely slice stalks. Place in saucepan with sliced white part of a leek, a small branch parsley, a branch chervil, blade mace and bay leaf. Pour in enough white broth to cover celery, season with level teaspoon salt, cover pan and let gently boil for thirty minutes. Remove, take up the bay leaf and mace, then press celery through sieve into a bowl.
Mix in a saucepan two tablespoons melted butter, three tablespoons flour and pour in one and a half gills milk. Add the puree of celery, with an ounce grated Parmesan cheese and saltspoon cayenne pepper, then briskly stir with a wooden spoon until thoroughly boiling. Add two egg yolks, sharply stir for three minutes longer and remove from range. Beat up whites of the two eggs to a stiff froth, add to celery and mix until well amalgamated. Fill up six round paper cases, place them on a tin, set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish with folded napkin and send to the table immediately.
A classic flour-thickened savoury soufflé, baked in paper cases rather than a dish. Two things in the original wording will mislead a modern cook: the celery quantity and the instruction to mix the whites in until "well amalgamated."
- "Two stalks celery"In cookbooks of this period "stalk" often meant the whole head rather than a single rib, and the tiny yield two ribs would give suggests that is the sense here. Read it as two full heads, trimmed of leaves.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup (about 180 ml).
- White brothA pale, unroasted stock — veal or chicken simmered without browning. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark beef stock, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Blade mace and chervilMace blades are the lacy husk of nutmeg and are sold whole by spice merchants; a pinch of ground mace added to the sauce is a reasonable stand-in, since the blade is fished out anyway. Fresh chervil is seasonal; a little tarragon plus extra parsley approximates it.
- Folding the whites"Mix until well amalgamated" reads as vigorous stirring, which is exactly what ruins a soufflé. Beat the whites to soft-stiff peaks, slacken the hot celery base with a spoonful of them, then fold the rest in with a spatula until barely streak-free.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, 375F (190C), suits a small savoury soufflé; twenty minutes is right for individual portions and they should be puffed and set at the edge with a faint wobble at the centre.
- Paper casesStiff pleated paper cases were standard; buttered 6-8 oz ramekins on a baking sheet do the same job. Fill about three-quarters full, not to the brim.
- Cool the base firstThe recipe sends the yolks in over heat and then goes straight to the whites. Take the pan off the burner before the yolks go in, and let the base drop to warm rather than hot before folding, or the whites will deflate on contact.
- Yield and timingSix small soufflés, enough for six as a first course. They fall within a few minutes of leaving the oven, which is why the original insists on sending them to the table immediately — have the diners seated first.
Savoury vegetable souffl"ery cookery was a fixture of professional French cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, and this recipe carries all the marks of that training: a bouquet of parsley, chervil, bay and mace simmered with the vegetable, a white broth rather than water, a roux-based panade bound with yolks, and Parmesan for savour. Celery itself was a prestige vegetable in the late nineteenth century — grown in blanched, labour-intensive beds, sold by the head, and set out raw in tall glass vases at formal dinners — so cooking two whole bunches down to a purée for six small cases was a genteel rather than a frugal act. The paper cases may point towards restaurant practice, though they also appear in domestic cookery books of the period: individual pleated cases let a kitchen bake and serve to order, and dressing them on a folded napkin kept them from sliding on the platter between the range and the dining room.