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Stewed Celery

A simple dish of boiled celery simmered in a light sauce of butter, flour, and celery stock, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Scrape and wash the green celery stalks thoroughly.

  2. Cut the stalks into one-inch pieces and soak in cold water for 15 minutes.

  3. Place the celery in a saucepan of boiling water with 1 teaspoon of salt and boil for 30 minutes.

  4. Drain the celery and transfer it to cold water while preparing the sauce.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a frying pan, melt 1 tablespoon of dripping over medium heat and add 1 tablespoon of flour, mixing until smooth.

  2. Stir in 3 tablespoons of the liquid from boiling the celery, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Add the celery to the sauce, stir until heated through, and serve.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Green celery stalks
The main vegetable; boiling softens its fibrous texture until tender.
Dripping (or butter)
Fat that carries flavour and enriches the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked briefly in the fat and liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the melted fat. Cooking the flour in the fat before adding liquid coats the starch grains so they disperse evenly. Stirring until smooth prevents lumps and gives a uniformly thick sauce.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper. 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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