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Celery with Cream

A simple dish of boiled celery simmered in a butter, flour, milk, and cream sauce with onion and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Prepare the celery by placing it in cold water, then bring to a boil and drain.

  2. Add the milk and onion to the celery, season with salt and pepper, and simmer gently for about 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In another pot, melt the butter, stir in the flour, and cook for a few minutes without browning.

  2. Remove the celery and keep it warm; strain the milk into the butter and flour mixture, stirring until boiling.

  3. Rub the cooked onion through a sieve, add it to the sauce along with the cream and lemon juice, season to taste, and simmer for about 5 minutes.

Serve

  1. Arrange the celery on a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and serve hot.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the main body of the dish and is gently softened by simmering in milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens when combined with the butter and flour.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and then combined with the hot milk.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness to the finished sauce.
Onion
Adds savory aroma and flavor to the milk, and body to the sauce once pressed through a sieve.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk into the roux. Cooking the flour in butter without browning gives a smooth base; adding the hot milk gradually while stirring prevents lumps, since the starch must be dispersed before it thickens.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, milk, cream, lemon, butter, flour, pepper. 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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