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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from simmered celery, milk, cream, and flour, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cut the celery into finger-lengths.

  2. Simmer the celery in milk for 10-15 minutes.

  3. Remove the celery and add cream to the milk.

  4. Thicken the mixture with flour as for white sauce.

  5. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with potatoes or toast.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Celery + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

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

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Celery
Flavors the milk as it simmers, giving the sauce its characteristic taste.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the cream enriches.
Cream
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour. Flour must be fully dispersed in the warm liquid, or it clumps instead of thickening evenly. Its starch swells as the mixture heats, so the sauce thickens gradually and the texture depends on even mixing.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cream, 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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