Skip to main content
Sauce

Celery Sauce, White

A white sauce made from celery, water, allspice, bay leaf, salt, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,422 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Celery Sauce, White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wash the celery, then cut it into 1-inch pieces.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the celery, water, allspice, bay leaf, and salt.

Cook the sauce

  1. Let the mixture stew until the celery is tender.

  2. Roll the butter with the flour, then add it to the sauce.

  3. Stir until the sauce boils.

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 + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,422 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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
Provides the main flavor and body of the sauce as it softens and releases its juices.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and gives the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter and liquid, giving it body.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour. Rolling butter with flour, then stirring it into hot liquid, helps the flour disperse evenly and thicken the sauce without lumps. Stirring until it boils lets the starch swell fully.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against allspice, 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes