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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A sauce made from stewed celery, celery puree, white sauce, and béchamel cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery puree

  1. Stew the celery sticks until tender.

  2. Once soft, pound them in a mortar and rub through a fine sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. For serving with pheasant, mix the celery puree into the white sauce.

  2. For chaufroix, combine 3 tablespoons of the celery puree with the béchamel cream and set aside.

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. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Celery + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,360 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 pounded and sieved, the body of the sauce.
White sauce
Forms the creamy, thickened base that the celery puree is stirred into.
Béchamel cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety body to the chaufroix.

The step that matters

Rubbing the celery through a fine sieve. Pounding and sieving breaks down and removes the fibres in the cooked celery. Skipping or rushing this leaves a stringy, grainy texture, while a fine sieve gives a smooth puree that blends evenly into the sauces.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, 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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