Home › Soups › Cream of Celery Soup
Cream of Celery Soup
3 cups celery, cut in 2 cups boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons flour 2 tablespoons fat 2 cups milk teaspoon pepper Wash and scrape celery and cut into inch pieces; add water and cook until very soft and tender; rub through sieve. Heat milk in double boiler, and add milk to celery. Melt fat, add flour and seasoning and mix with soup. 1/2 can or 1 pint tomatoes 2 teaspoons sugar teaspoon soda
A plain early-twentieth-century cream soup: vegetable purée thinned with scalded milk and thickened with a flour-and-fat roux. The method is sound, though the proportions want restating in modern terms.
- Working proportionsThe celery quantity is missing from the page and the fractions before "teaspoon salt" and "teaspoon pepper" have dropped out. For 2 cups of milk and 2 tablespoons each of flour and fat, something like 2 cups of sliced celery (roughly one small head, outer ribs and leaves included) cooked in 1 to 1 1/2 cups of water will work. Read the seasoning as about 1 teaspoon salt and a small fraction of a teaspoon of pepper.
- Combine off the boilThe hinge is the order of assembly. Cook the flour into the melted fat for a minute or two before it meets any liquid, then add the hot celery purée and milk gradually and off a hard boil. Flour stirred loose into already-hot soup gives lumps and a raw, pasty taste.
- Why the double boilerMilk scalded over direct heat scorched easily. A heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat does the same work; heat the milk only until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim, not to a boil.
- "Rub through sieve"This means pressing the cooked celery and its liquid through a fine strainer with a wooden spoon or ladle to leave the stringy fibre behind. A blender followed by a strainer is faster and gives a smoother result, since celery strings do not break down.
- Fat"Fat" here is butter, drippings or a solid vegetable shortening, whichever the household had. Butter is the best choice for a delicate celery flavour.
- YieldAbout a quart, or four modest first-course servings. Thin with a little of the reserved celery water if it stiffens on standing.
Cream soups of this pattern -- a cooked vegetable purée, scalded milk, and a flour-and-fat thickening -- were the backbone of American soup chapters from the 1890s through the 1940s, taught as a single formula with the vegetable swapped out: celery, asparagus, pea, corn, tomato. Celery was a fashionable and comparatively expensive market vegetable in that era, often sold as a table relish in cut-glass celery vases, and a cream soup was often recommended as a thrifty way to use the tough outer ribs and leafy tops that were too coarse to serve raw.