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Celery Sauce for the Goose
To one cupful of drawn butter made from white stock add one cupful of white celery, cut in small dice, and cooked tender. Simmer five minutes, season and serve with the goose.
A short sauce that assumes you already know what "drawn butter" meant in 1900 — not clarified butter, but a thin flour-and-butter sauce. Everything else follows from that.
- Drawn butter, definedIn American books of this period drawn butter is a light roux sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons butter cooked with 2 tablespoons flour, then whisked with a cup of hot liquid and simmered until it coats a spoon. It is not clarified butter; British books using the same phrase generally mean plain melted butter.
- White stockA pale, unroasted stock of veal or chicken bones with onion, celery and a bay leaf, made without browning so the sauce stays ivory. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- White celeryCelery was commonly blanched under soil or boards to keep the stalks pale and mild, and the whiteness was the point in a white sauce. Use the inner pale heart stalks, strings pulled, cut in quarter-inch dice.
- Cook the celery separately"Cooked tender" means simmered in salted water or a little of the stock for 8–10 minutes before it goes into the sauce, then drained. Diced celery dropped raw into the finished sauce will still be crunchy after the five-minute simmer.
- The five minutes mattersThat final simmer is to marry the flavours and cook out any floury taste, not to soften the vegetable. Stir it; a flour-thickened sauce with solids in it catches on the bottom of the pan quickly.
- SeasoningSalt, white pepper for the sake of appearance, and a grating of nutmeg if you like — a common finish for white sauces of the era. A spoonful of cream or a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts it against rich goose.
- YieldTwo cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside a goose. It thickens as it stands, so hold it over hot water and loosen with a little stock before serving.
Celery sauce belongs to the nineteenth-century English and American habit of pairing a sharp or aromatic sauce with fatty birds — apple with pork, onion or celery with goose and turkey, bread sauce with game. Celery was a winter luxury in that era: growers banked earth or boards against the plants to blanch the stalks white and sweet, which is why so many recipes specify "white celery" and why the vegetable turns up so often in December cookery. The sauce here is built on drawn butter, often described as a workhorse base of American home kitchens before French velouté vocabulary took hold in domestic manuals.