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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A sauce made from boiled celery, egg yolk, lemon juice, butter, salt, pepper, and optional flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the celery until tender.

  2. Pass the celery through a sieve.

  3. Mix in the beaten egg yolk and lemon juice.

  4. Add butter, salt, and pepper to taste.

  5. If desired, thicken with flour.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  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 flavour and the bulk of the sauce once boiled and sieved.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and helps it set into a smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce slightly if used, giving it more body.

The step that matters

Mix in the beaten egg yolk and lemon juice. Egg yolk thickens when heated gently, but if the sauce is too hot when it goes in, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy. Adding it off the heat or with the sauce only warm keeps it smooth.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lemon, butter, pepper, flour. 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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