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Cream of Celery Soup (Wash scrape and cut into)
Wash, scrape and cut into half-inch pieces, sufficient celery to measure one pint, add to it one pint of boiling water and cook until very tender. Mash and put water and celery through a fine sieve, rubbing through as much of the pulp as possible. Melt one tablespoonful of butter, add one tablespoonful of flour and stir until blended, add gradually three cups of hot milk and stir until smooth, slightly thickened. Add the prepared celery, five drops of onion juice and salt and pepper to taste and stand over hot water for five minutes. One-half cup of cream may be added just before serving.
A plain white-sauce soup that depends entirely on how far you push the celery through the sieve. Everything else is timing and seasoning.
- A pint of celeryCelery is measured by volume here, not weight: a pint of half-inch pieces is roughly 7-8 oz, about four good stalks. Use the outer ribs and the leafy tops, which carry more flavour than the pale heart.
- Sieve or blenderThe original wants the cooked celery rubbed through a fine sieve so the strings are left behind. A blender or immersion blender does the pulping, but still pass it through a sieve afterward — celery fibre does not break down and will make the soup stringy.
- Cook it soft"Very tender" means 20-25 minutes at a simmer, until a piece collapses under a spoon. Undercooked celery will not go through the sieve and you lose most of the pulp.
- Onion juiceFive drops of onion juice was got by grating an onion and pressing the pulp. Grate a small onion on a microplane and press out the liquid, then use five drops of it; a quarter of a small onion simmered with the celery and sieved out achieves much the same thing.
- Keep the roux paleOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to three cups of milk is a thin sauce by design. Cook the flour a minute before adding milk, but do not let it colour — the soup should stay ivory.
- Standing over hot waterThe five minutes over hot water is a double boiler, used because a milk soup scorches on direct heat. A heavy pan on the lowest burner works, stirred occasionally.
- CurdlingThe soup is nearly all milk. Add the cream off the heat and do not let the finished soup boil after the puree goes in.
- YieldAbout five cups, or four modest first-course servings. It thickens slightly as it stands; loosen with hot milk rather than water.
Cream soups built on a butter-and-flour base thinned with milk were the backbone of American home cookery around 1900, when the cooking-school movement — the Boston Cooking School, where Fannie Farmer trained and later served as principal, chief among them — codified the white sauce into a set of fixed ratios that could be applied to celery, asparagus, corn or potato with almost no change of method. Celery itself was still something of a status vegetable in the nineteenth century, blanched in trenches and served upright in tall cut-glass vases at the table, and a soup was a thrifty way to use the coarse outer ribs that were too stringy to eat raw. The instruction to finish over hot water rather than direct flame reflects a coal or wood range, where the heat was hard to lower quickly and a milk soup left on the hob would scorch within minutes.