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Celery, Creole Style
1 cup diced celery 2 tablespoons finely chopped onion 1 tablespoon butter 2 teaspoons finely chopped green pepper 1-3 1-2 1-3 cup canned tomatoes cup boiling water teaspoon salt Put celery in saucepan with boiling water and boil 10 minutes or until tender. Melt butter, add onion, salt and pepper, and cook slowly 5 minutes and stir in the tomatoes, add celery and cook the entire mixture 10 to 15 minutes longer.
A small, quick braise of celery in tomato — enough for two as a side. The main obstacle is the scrambled column of fractions, which the original typesetting has run together.
- Reading the mangled measurementsThe line "1-3 1-2 1-3" is a column of fractions that collapsed in printing: 1/3 cup canned tomatoes, 1/2 cup boiling water, 1/3 teaspoon salt. A 1/3 teaspoon of salt is an odd figure, though not unknown in recipes of the period; season to taste rather than trusting it.
- "Salt and pepper" is the green pepperThe ingredient list calls for 2 teaspoons finely chopped green pepper — sweet bell pepper, not black pepper. When the method says to cook the onion with "salt and pepper," it means that chopped green pepper going into the butter with the onion.
- Don't boil the celery ten minutesA cup of small-diced celery in half a cup of water is tender in 4 to 5 minutes and turns limp and stringless past that. Since it gets another 10 to 15 minutes in the tomato, stop the first boil while it still has some bite.
- Keep the cooking waterThe recipe never says to drain, and you should not: half a cup reduces to almost nothing and carries the celery flavour into the sauce. If the pan looks dry when the tomatoes go in, add a spoonful of water.
- Canned tomatoes then and nowA third of a cup is a very small quantity — this is celery lightly dressed in tomato, not a stew. Whole peeled tomatoes crushed by hand suit it better than the thicker modern crushed or pureed styles.
- "Creole style" here means the trinity"Creole style" here means tomato -- Onion and green pepper softened in butter with tomato is the shorthand. Cook the onion and pepper gently until soft but not coloured; browning them pushes the dish somewhere else.
- YieldRoughly a cup of finished vegetable by my reckoning, enough for two; the recipe itself gives no yield. It scales up cleanly in a wide pan, which helps the sauce reduce.
Celery was a prestige vegetable in American households into the early twentieth century — sold upright in cut-glass vases for the table. Cooked celery dishes like this one belong to the thrifty end of that habit. "Creole style" in the corporate and utility-company cookbooks of the period had drifted a long way from New Orleans: it tended to function as a label for dishes built on tomato with onion and green pepper. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed its cook book free to policyholders as part of a broad welfare-and-health campaign, which may be why the vegetable section leans toward small, cheap, plainly seasoned dishes.