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Stewed Celery

A dish of celery simmered in a milk, flour, and butter sauce, topped with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Celery

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Remove the leaves and tough outer strings from the celery and cut into pieces.

Make the sauce and cook

  1. Cover the celery with a sauce made from milk thickened with flour and butter.

  2. Cook on the bottom shelf of the oven at 400°F (200°C) for 1 to 2 hours.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cooked celery and sprinkle with bread crumbs before serving.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Forms the bulk of the dish and softens into tender pieces during long cooking.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, adding moisture and a creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as it heats and the starch gelatinizes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, improving flavor and mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce. Flour must be cooked with the milk and butter long enough to gelatinize its starch, or the sauce will stay thin and taste raw.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, bread. 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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