Skip to main content
Sauce

Celery Sauce for Fowls and Game

A creamy celery sauce seasoned with mace, nutmeg, pepper, and salt, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Celery Sauce for Fowls and Game

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and clean the celery, then cut it into small thin pieces.

Cook the sauce

  1. Boil the celery gently in a little water until tender.

  2. Add the beaten mace, nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

  3. Thicken the sauce with butter rolled in flour, then bring it to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce into a dish.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Celery + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,331 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main body and vegetable flavour of the sauce as it softens in water.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when rolled with butter and heated, giving it body.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with butter rolled in flour, then bring it to a boil. Flour must be cooked after it is added so its starch swells and thickens the liquid. Adding it without enough heating or stirring can leave lumps or a raw, floury taste.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, nutmeg, pepper, butter, 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.

More celery sauce recipes

White 5Brown 3for Boiled Turkey 3for Turkey 3 See all 250 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes