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Fried Celery
(Sedani fritti) This is a convenient way to prepare left-over celery that is still too good to be thrown away.
Clean the left-over celery removing as best you can the sauce in which they were served, dip in frying paste (flour and egg) fry and serve with lemon. 169
A two-line leftovers note rather than a full recipe, so most of the work is filling in what the original assumes a cook already knows. The hinge is dryness: celery that has sat in sauce will shed liquid and the batter will slide off.
- What "left-over celery" meansThe recipe says only to remove "the sauce in which they were served," so what is meant is celery already cooked and dressed in some sauce. Cooked-tender stalks or hearts, cut into manageable lengths, are what is wanted; the original gives no size.
- Dry it properlyWipe off the old sauce and blot the pieces on a towel before battering. Surface moisture is the main reason the batter slides off.
- "Frying paste (flour and egg)"A pastella: roughly 1 beaten egg to 3–4 tablespoons flour and a pinch of salt, loosened with a spoonful of water or milk to the thickness of heavy cream. It should coat a piece and cling, not run off in sheets.
- Fat and temperatureOlive oil or lard, deep enough to float the pieces, at 340–350F. An egg batter browns fast; expect 2–3 minutes total, turning once, and drain on paper.
- The lemon is not a garnishFried celery is mild and rich; the wedge squeezed over at the table is what makes it read as a course. Salt the pieces the moment they leave the fat.
- Yield and place at tableThe original gives no quantity; this is a use for whatever is left over, and can form part of a fritto misto with fried artichokes, zucchini and mozzarella. Serve at once — batter-fried vegetables go limp quickly.
Frying vegetables in a flour-and-egg pastella is one of the oldest domestic economies in Italian cooking, and the fritto misto of the Italian north and centre is essentially a way of turning odds and ends of vegetable — artichoke bottoms, zucchini, cardoons, celery hearts — into something worth carrying to the table. This particular entry is frankly a thrift note, and it sits well with the general character of Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (published in New York in 1919), which was aimed at American households learning Italian dishes on modest budgets: nothing that has already been cooked once is allowed to go to waste. Celery is worth noting in its own right here, since in Italian cooking it more often disappears into the soffritto or the broth pot than appears as a dish in its own name; braised celery hearts as a separate course belong to an older tradition in which the vegetable was grown blanched and pale and treated as something closer to a delicacy than a flavouring.