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Cream of Celery Soup (Three pints of boiling water)
In three pints of boiling water cook three cupfuls of celery (cut fine) until sufficiently tender to be rubbed through a sieve. Into a saucepan put one heaping tablespoonful of butter and the same amount of flour and mix over the fire, add one pint of milk and stir until it thickens. Season with salt and pepper, add the celery, puree and simmer for ten minutes. A cupful of scalded cream, added just before serving, is a great improvement.
A straightforward white-sauce cream soup that needs almost no translation, though a few of the proportions and steps reward attention.
- Cook the celery in less waterThree pints of water for three cups of celery gives a thin, weak broth. Simmer the celery in about a pint of water or light stock, then sieve it with its liquid so the flavour goes into the soup rather than down the drain.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the standard purée method of the period. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds, but celery is stringy enough that a pass through a fine sieve afterwards is still worth the trouble.
- The roux is the hingeCook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before the milk goes in, and add the milk gradually while stirring. Flour that has not been cooked out leaves a pasty taste that the mild celery cannot hide.
- Heaping tablespoonfulsA heaping tablespoon of butter is roughly 20 g, a heaping tablespoon of flour roughly 12–15 g — enough to thicken a pint of milk to a light pouring sauce. If you reduce the cooking water as suggested above, the finished soup will be thicker, so hold back some liquid.
- Scalded creamScalding meant heating just short of boiling, until the surface trembles and bubbles form at the edge; it was often said to help keep unpasteurised cream from souring. With modern cream it simply prevents the cold addition from dropping the soup's temperature; warm it and stir it in off the heat.
- Do not boil after the milk goes inTen minutes at a bare simmer is enough. A hard boil after the milk and cream are in risks curdling.
- SeasoningCelery soup is famously bland without help. Salt generously, use white pepper if you want to keep the colour clean, and a grating of nutmeg or a bay leaf in the milk is in keeping with the period.
- YieldAbout two quarts as written, serving six to eight as a first course.
Cream soups of this construction — a vegetable purée bound with a milk-and-flour sauce — were a staple of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the First World War, appearing in familiar variations: celery, asparagus, corn, pea, tomato. The pattern came out of the cooking-school movement, where the white sauce was taught as a fixed formula that could be varied endlessly, making it ideal for the domestic-science classroom. Celery itself was a fashionable and relatively expensive vegetable in this period, sold in tall glass celery vases at table and served raw as a savoury; it was blanched by banking earth over the growing stalks, which produced the pale, mild stems the recipe assumes. The instruction to rub the vegetable through a sieve reflects the standard method for achieving a smooth purée, and the closing note that scalded cream is "a great improvement" reflects an era when cream was a real expense to be added at the cook's discretion.