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October 28
Menu: Shrimp Canapes; Roast Mutton, Onion Sauce; Celeriac; Sweet Potatoes; Corn Salad Pumpkin Pie; Coffee Celeriac-Well wash and peel the celeriac. Cut them in quarters and boil in boiling salted water until quite tender. Drain well and a arhot dish and pour egg range in sauce over them. For egg sauce, blend 2 tablespoons Crisco with 2 tablespoons flour, add 1 cup milk and stir till boiling, add seasoning of salt and pepper and boil for 8 minutes, stirring all the time, then add 2 hard-cooked eggs rubbed through a sieve, mix well and serve.
A plain boiled vegetable with a white sauce enriched by sieved hard-cooked egg — the sort of side dish that filled out a 1913 dinner menu. Two details need attention: how celeriac is cut, and how long the sauce actually needs.
- Crisco and the rouxCrisco here is doing the job of butter in a béchamel. Any solid or liquid fat works; butter gives markedly better flavour, and the quantities (2 tablespoons fat to 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk) are a standard medium white sauce.
- Cook the flour, not the sauceBoiling the finished sauce a full 8 minutes with constant stirring is longer than needed and will reduce it to paste. Cook the flour and fat together a minute or two before the milk goes in, then simmer 3-4 minutes after it thickens to lose the raw starch taste.
- Peeling celeriacThe skin is thick, knobbly and full of grit. Slice the top and root end flat, stand the bulb up and cut the peel away with a knife rather than a peeler, taking the hollows out entirely.
- Quarters are largeA modern celeriac can be large, and quarters of a big one may need half an hour or so. Cutting into roughly 1-inch wedges or chunks will bring the cooking time down appreciably.
- Acidulate the waterCut celeriac browns quickly. Hold the pieces in water with a squeeze of lemon until they go into the pot, and add lemon to the cooking water to keep them pale.
- Drain thoroughlyCeleriac holds water and will thin the sauce on the serving dish. Let it steam dry in the colander for a minute before saucing.
- The eggsRubbing hard-cooked eggs through a sieve gives a fine, even texture that chopping does not. Stir them in at the last moment, as the recipe directs, and serve.
- YieldOne large celeriac and this quantity of sauce serves four as a side.
Celeriac — the swollen root of a celery variety grown for the base rather than the stalks — was long more familiar in German, Dutch and French kitchens than in American ones, and English-language cookbooks of the period often introduce it as a novelty or by the older name celery root. Egg sauce, a white sauce carrying sieved or chopped hard-cooked egg, was common in nineteenth-century household cookery, often served with boiled fish and salt cod, and turned here to a vegetable. The manufacturer's cookbooks worked through applications where butter or lard had been assumed, from pastry to white sauce, showing the new hydrogenated shortening could stand in. The date at the end places the dish in the book's day-by-day dinner calendar, a common promotional format that gave home cooks a full year of menus with the product woven through them.