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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from boiled celery, cream, flour, milk, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the white parts of the celery into small pieces.

  2. Boil the celery in ½ pint of water until tender.

  3. Add ½ pint of cream and 1 teaspoon of flour dissolved in a little milk.

  4. When the mixture thickens, add 1 teaspoon of butter and ¼ teaspoon of salt.

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

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 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 main body of the sauce and gives it its flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce becomes smooth and coats the spoon.
Butter
Adds fat for a rounded flavour and glossy finish.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour must be dissolved fully in milk before it goes in, otherwise it clumps. Stirring it into the hot liquid lets the starch swell evenly, giving a smooth sauce that thickens as it heats.

Swap the celery

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

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

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