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Celery with White Sauce

A dish of boiled celery served with a white sauce made from butter, flour, egg yolk, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 with White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Trim the roots and cut the celery to about six inches.

  2. Wash the celery carefully and tie them together with string.

Cook the celery

  1. Place the celery in a saucepan with the onion, mace, whole pepper, salt, and enough boiling water to cover.

  2. Boil until the celery is tender, then drain and remove the string.

Make the white sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and mix in the flour.

  2. Add enough of the reserved boiling water to make a sauce and season with salt.

  3. Off the heat, stir in the beaten egg yolk mixed with the strained lemon juice.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Celery
Is the main vegetable that becomes tender through boiling.
Butter
Carries the flour and gives the white sauce its rich flavour and smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter so it can form a smooth sauce with the cooking water.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce when stirred in off the heat.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Off the heat, stir in the egg yolk. Adding the yolk over direct heat can scramble it and make the sauce grainy. Removing the pan from the heat first lets the yolk thicken gently and evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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