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Dressing of Celery
(Sedano per contorno) The following are three ways to prepare celery to be served as seasoning or seasoning for meat dishes. For the first two make the pieces about four inches long, and two inches for the third.
The stalk must be skinned, cut crosswise and left attached to the rib of the celery. Boil it in water moderately salted not over five minutes and remove dry. 1. Put the celery to brown in butter, then complete the cooking with brown stock (No. 13) and sprinkle with grated cheese when serving. 2. Put in saucepan a piece of butter and a hash made with ham and a middle sized onion, chopped fine. Add two cloves and make it boil.
When the onion is browned add soup stock or hot water with bouillon cubes and complete the cooking. Then rub everything through a sieve and put the gravy in a plate with the celery, seasoning with pepper only, as the salt is already in the ham and serve with the gravy. 3. Dip the celery in flour and in the paste for frying (No. 58) and fry in fat or oil. Or else dip in flour and then in beaten egg, wrap in bread crumbs and fry. 104
Three finishes for the same blanched celery: braised in stock, sauced with a ham and onion purée, or fried. The prep is identical for all three, and it is where the dish succeeds or fails.
- "Contorno" means side dishSedano per contorno is celery served alongside or under a meat course, not a seasoning in the sense of a spice. The English here is a stiff translation of the Italian.
- Skinning the stalks"Skinned" means stripping the tough outer strings with a peeler or paring knife. Older celery varieties were considerably more fibrous than today's; with modern hearts and inner ribs you may only need to peel the outermost stalks.
- Cut crosswise and left attachedThe instruction is obscure, but appears to describe scoring the thick base of the rib partway through so it cooks evenly and stays in one piece rather than splitting. Cut lengths of 4 inches for methods 1 and 2, 2 inches for the fried version.
- Five minutes is the limitThe blanch is meant to soften and de-bitter, not to cook. Celery boiled longer collapses and will not brown or hold up in batter. Drain it and dry it thoroughly, especially before frying.
- Brown stock (No. 13)A cross-reference to the book's own recipe: a browned meat stock. A good unsalted beef or veal stock does the job; reduce it a little if it is thin, since the celery gives off water.
- The batter (No. 58)Another internal reference, to the book's frying batter, typically flour slackened with water or wine and enriched with oil, sometimes lightened with beaten egg white. Any standard fritter batter works, and the alternative given here of flour, egg and breadcrumbs is the more forgiving route.
- Salt and the hamMethod 2 is right that a salty cured ham plus bouillon cubes carries enough salt. Taste before adding any.
- Quantities and yieldNo amounts are given anywhere. A reasonable working scale: one large head of celery, 2 to 3 tablespoons butter, 1 medium onion and about 2 oz ham, serving four as a side. The unspecified grated cheese is most likely Parmigiano.
- Whole clovesTwo cloves in the ham and onion base is deliberate and assertive. Fish them out before sieving, or the purée turns medicinal.
The Italian Cook Book (Maria Gentile, 1919) was aimed at American households and is generally seen as indebted to Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the book that did more than any other to fix a shared idea of Italian domestic cooking after unification. The internal cross-references here, to a brown stock and a frying batter numbered elsewhere, are the Artusi habit of building a repertoire out of a few base preparations. Celery as a cooked vegetable rather than a raw relish was familiar in Italy, though it was also known in the English-speaking kitchen, where celery of this period was still often treated as a luxury salad item, sold blanched and pale in tall glass vases at the table. Offering the same vegetable braised, sauced and fried within one entry is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which assumed the cook wanted variations on a cheap ingredient rather than a single fixed dish.