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Baked Celery

A baked dish of celery simmered in milk and butter, mixed with flour, egg, and bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Baked Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut cleaned celery into 1-inch lengths.

  2. Blanch in boiling water for 10 minutes, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, butter, flour, salt, and pepper; simmer for 3 minutes after heating.

  2. Pour the mixture into a basin to cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Butter a shallow pie dish and sprinkle the bottom with bread crumbs.

  2. Once the celery is cold, beat in the egg and pour the mixture into the dish.

  3. Thickly sprinkle bread crumbs on top, cover, and bake for 20 minutes.

  4. Remove the cover and brown the top.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Mutton + breadtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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, becoming tender after blanching and baking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that coats and moistens the celery.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce that holds the celery together.
Egg
Sets when baked, binding the sauce so it firms into a sliceable custard.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping over the cooked celery.

The step that matters

Beat the egg into the cold celery mixture. Egg proteins set when heated, so adding egg to a hot sauce can scramble it into lumps. Letting the mixture cool first keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, mutton, bread, flour, pepper, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, mutton, bread, flour, pepper, egg. 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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