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Celery Au Jus
(Sedano al sugo) Select nine or ten heads, neither too hard nor too soft, and cut them about four inches from the root. Remove the green and hard branches and trim the root, cutting the latter to a point.
Scald the celery, after washing well, in salted boiling water. Ten minutes will be sufficient. Dip in cold water, open well the leaves and wash again carefully. Drain and make bunches of two or three heads each that you will put in a saucepan with a pint of broth or water and half a cup of good fat, onion and carrot chopped, salt and pepper. Cover and let it simmer for about two hour. Then remove the celery, drain and serve. 167
A braise of whole celery hearts in broth and fat, of the kind that would be served as a vegetable second course. The method is sound; the timing belongs to an older, tougher vegetable.
- The two-hour simmerCelery sold today is bred to be tender and stringless, and it will collapse into threads long before two hours are up. Trimmed hearts that have already been blanched ten minutes need 30 to 45 minutes covered at a bare simmer, until a knife slides through the base with no resistance.
- "Nine or ten heads"Heads of celery in this period were generally smaller and often field-blanched pale, so fewer modern heads, trimmed to the hearts, may give a comparable volume. The recipe gives no indication of how many it serves.
- Cut four inches from the rootThis is the point of the dish: you are keeping the pale heart and the intact root end, not the long outer ribs. Reserve the discarded green branches for stock rather than throwing them out.
- "Half a cup of good fat"Lard, rendered pancetta fat, or the skimmed fat from a broth pot. Butter or olive oil both work; half a cup is generous by current taste and a quarter cup is enough to gloss the finished celery.
- The second washingNot fussiness. Scalding relaxes the ribs so grit trapped at the base of the leaves can finally be rinsed out, and celery hearts hold a surprising amount of sand. Skip it and the sauce will be gritty.
- Tying the bunchesBind each bundle of two or three hearts with kitchen twine before it goes in the pan. Braised celery falls apart when lifted otherwise, and the recipe expects you to remove it whole.
- Al sugo, and the liquidA pint of broth for that much celery is a shallow braise, not a boil, and the vegetable should sit in it rather than swim. After removing the celery, reduce what remains with the onion and carrot to a few spoonfuls and pour it over.
Sedano al sugo comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of a run of English-language Italian cookbooks published in New York for American households curious about a cuisine they mostly knew through immigrant restaurants. That a braised vegetable should be treated so substantially reflects Italian practice, where it stands as a course in its own right. Celery reached the table this way long before it became a raw crudite: through the nineteenth century it was commonly grown blanched, earthed up or trenched to keep the ribs pale and mild, and the pale heart was treated as a delicacy to be stewed, gratineed or served al sugo with fat and broth. The instruction to cut the root to a point is the mark of a cook who expects the bundle to be served whole and to look like something.