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Cream of Celery Soup (Pound a head of celery)
Pound a head of celery and boil it in one pint of rich chicken broth for twenty minutes (if boiled too long it loses the flavor of the celery). Mix two tablespoonfuls of flour with two tablespoonfuls of table butter; add this to the boiling chicken broth and celery; also a half pint of cream and a half pint of milk. Season with salt and pepper to taste. If too thick, add a little more broth to suit the taste. Strain and serve immediately.
A straightforward velvet soup that depends on two things: not overcooking the celery, and finishing the roux properly. The original's instructions are complete but compressed.
- "Pound a head of celery"This means bruise or crush the stalks in a mortar to release their juice, not weigh out a pound. A modern equivalent is to chop a whole bunch of celery fine, or pulse it briefly in a food processor, before it goes into the broth.
- Twenty minutes, and no moreThe parenthetical warning is the hinge of the recipe: the original states plainly that longer cooking loses the celery flavour. Take the celery out at twenty minutes rather than letting it go on.
- The butter and flourTwo tablespoons each are worked together raw and added to the boiling broth in small pieces rather than as one lump. Whisk them in and let the soup simmer a few minutes so the flour cooks out.
- "Table butter"Butter of eating quality, as opposed to cooking or rendered butter. Season at the end in any case, since the chicken broth will already carry salt.
- Dairy at the endA half pint is one cup, so a cup of cream and a cup of milk go into a pint of broth. Add them off the boil and reheat only to a bare simmer; boiling after the cream goes in risks curdling, especially with an acidic or heavily reduced broth.
- StrainingThe pounded celery is meant to be strained out entirely, leaving a clear-textured cream soup. Press the solids hard against the sieve to recover the liquid. If you would rather have body, blend before straining or skip the strainer, though the result is a different soup than the one intended.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished soup, or four servings as a first course.
Cream of celery belongs to the family of white cream soups that dominated American formal menus from the 1880s through the 1920s, alongside cream of asparagus, celery's usual companion in that lineup. Celery itself was something of a luxury vegetable in the nineteenth century: it required trenching and blanching to produce the pale, tender stalks then prized, and it was often served raw in tall cut-glass celery vases as a centerpiece. That a soup like this leads with rich chicken broth and finishes with equal parts cream and milk is characteristic of the era's cookery, where a first course was expected to be smooth, mild and pale rather than assertive.