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Celery Au Jus

Celery boiled in stock, served with a butter‑flour sauce made from reserved cooking liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Celery Au Jus

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Wash the celery and cut it into 1‑inch pieces.

Cook the celery

  1. Cover the celery with boiling stock, season with salt, and boil for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter until browned, then add the flour and mix until smooth.

  2. Drain the celery and add ½ pint of the reserved cooking liquid to the butter and flour mixture.

  3. Stir until it boils, then season to taste.

Serve

  1. Place the celery in a heated dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Celery + buttertop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the main body of the dish and gives it its mild, vegetable flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and browned, nutty flavour to the sauce base.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Reserved cooking liquid
Carries flavour from the cooked celery and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the browned butter. Flour must be cooked briefly in the fat and mixed smooth before liquid is added, or it forms lumps. The liquid then needs to be stirred until it boils so the starch thickens fully and the sauce loses its raw floury taste.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour):

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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