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Celery with Gravy

Celery with gravy is a dish of boiled celery topped with a sauce made from almond butter or peanut cream, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Celery with Gravy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Wash the celery and cut it into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Cook the celery in boiling water until very tender, then drain, reserving the cooking water.

Make the gravy

  1. In a saucepan, combine ½ cup of the reserved water with almond butter or peanut cream and bring to a boil.

  2. Thicken the sauce with 1 teaspoon of white flour and season with coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a beaten egg if desired.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the cooked celery.

  2. Serve hot.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Celery + almondtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together485 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Almond + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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 becomes tender when cooked until very soft.
Almond butter or peanut cream
Adds richness and nutty flavour and body to the sauce.
White flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats in the cooking water.
Beaten egg
Optional addition that can enrich and slightly thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour. Flour must be fully incorporated and the sauce brought to a boil so starch swells and thickens it smoothly; adding it to cold liquid or leaving it unheated can leave lumps or a thin, raw-tasting sauce.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, flour, egg. 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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