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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from finely chopped celery, water, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and heavy cream, simmered and served with fowl.

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 ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Cut the celery into very fine pieces.

  2. Boil the celery with cold water and salt for 15 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, make a cream sauce using half of the celery water instead of milk.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste.

  3. Stir in the heavy cream. Mix well.

  4. Add the boiled celery through a colander.

  5. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  6. Serve with fowl.

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. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  3. Celery + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,331 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + creamtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Celery + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and, once boiled and strained, body to the sauce.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Make the cream sauce with celery water. Using the celery cooking water in place of milk carries flavour into the base. Stirring in cream after the base is made, then simmering gently rather than boiling hard, helps the sauce stay smooth and avoids curdling or separating.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, nutmeg, cream. 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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