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Celery Sauce

A creamy celery sauce made with stock, mace, herbs, butter, flour, cream, lemon juice, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Remove the leaves from the celery and cut it into 2‑inch pieces.

  2. Boil the celery in salted water until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew pan, combine the white stock, mace, and herbs; simmer for 30 minutes to extract flavor.

  2. Strain the liquid, then add the cooked celery.

  3. Thicken with butter kneaded with flour or arrowroot.

  4. Just before serving, stir in the cream and bring to a boil.

  5. Squeeze in lemon juice and season with salt and white pepper to taste.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 body and the characteristic celery flavor of the sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, kneaded with flour, thickens it as a roux-style paste.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with starch once it is kneaded into the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
White stock
Serves as the cooking liquid that carries the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with butter and flour. Flour must be fully blended into the butter before it goes into the liquid, otherwise it forms lumps. Starch thickens only as the liquid heats, so the sauce needs to simmer long enough for the thickening to set.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, mace, butter, flour, cream, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, mace, butter, flour, cream, lemon. 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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