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Celery with Butter
(Sedano al burro) Two heads of celery for each person.
Clean and trim, removing the sprigs that are too hard, and the leaves, that are to be cut where they begin to be green. Finally trim the stem.
Then wash repeatedly in running water, drain and put to boil in salted boiling water. Remove when cooked and drain again.
About three quarters of an hour before serving, melt a piece of butter in a saucepan and brown the celery, turning them often for about ten minutes. After that pour over hot stock (soup stock or chicken broth) cover the saucepan and parboil. A few moments before serving season with brown stock, if you have any at hand, otherwise with salt and pepper only.
A two-stage vegetable braise: celery is boiled first, then browned in butter and finished in stock. The instructions are loose in the way translated Italian cookbooks of the period often are, and two words in particular need reading past.
- "Two heads for each person"Two full modern heads per person is far more celery than the dish wants; the heads meant here were almost certainly smaller and slenderer than a supermarket head today, closer to what we would call a heart. One modern head per two people is nearer the intended quantity; use the pale inner ribs and hearts and save the coarse outer stalks for stock.
- "Parboil" means simmerThe translator uses parboil for the covered braise in stock, not in the modern English sense of a brief partial boil. Add enough hot stock to come partway up the celery, cover, and let it simmer gently until tender; expect something in the region of 20 to 30 minutes depending on thickness.
- Don't overboil at the first stageThe initial boil in salted water should leave the ribs firm at the centre, 8 to 10 minutes for trimmed hearts. They finish cooking in the butter and stock, and celery boiled to full tenderness first will collapse into strings later.
- The three-quarters of an hourThat is the whole finishing sequence, not the braise alone: ten minutes browning plus the covered simmer, timed so the dish arrives at table hot. The boiling and trimming can be done hours ahead.
- "Brown stock"This most likely stands for the concentrated meat gravy an Italian kitchen kept on hand rather than a French-style brown stock. A spoonful of pan juices from a roast, or well-reduced stock, does the same job; the recipe openly permits salt and pepper instead.
- TrimmingCutting the leaves "where they begin to be green" removes the bitter tops while keeping the tender pale ones. Peeling the stringy outer ribs with a vegetable peeler is worth the minute it takes.
- YieldSubstantial enough to stand as a vegetable dish rather than a mere garnish. Alongside meat, one head of celery serves two to three.
Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was assembled for American readers out of the Italian domestic tradition, of which Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene is the best-known codification; that tradition gives vegetables cooked in butter and finished with meat gravy standing as a dish rather than a garnish. Celery has a long history in central Italy, where Trevi in Umbria still holds an autumn festival for its dark local variety, and the plant was long blanched by heaping earth around the stalks to keep it pale and mild. The two-step method of boiling and then browning in butter suits an older celery, stronger and more fibrous than the uniformly bred stalks sold now.