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Celery Sauce

A creamy celery sauce made by boiling celery, onion, and spices in milk, thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,668 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the celery very small.

Make the sauce

  1. Boil the celery, onion, and spices in the milk until soft, about 1.5 hours.

  2. Remove the onion and spices before thickening.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour to a custard-like consistency.

Serve

  1. Pour over turkey and serve.

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 + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the flavour of the simmered aromatics.
Celery
Softens as it simmers, adding body and a fresh vegetal flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the sauce a smooth, custard-like body.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid to gelatinise its starch and thicken the sauce. Adding it too quickly or without enough stirring can create lumps, and too little cooking leaves a raw, pasty taste.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, celery, onion, clove, flour):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, celery, onion, clove, 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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