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Celery Sauce

A savory sauce made from celery, onion, parsley, thyme, ham, butter, flour, broth, milk, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Strip the outer parts of the celery stems, wash the remaining portion, and cut into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Boil the celery in a small amount of good white broth until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onion thinly and place it in a stewpan with parsley, thyme, and ham (if using).

  2. Sweat the mixture in a little butter until the onions are soft.

  3. Stir in enough flour to thicken the sauce.

  4. Gradually mix in the broth from the celery and enough boiling new milk.

  5. Let it boil for 20 minutes.

  6. Strain through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cooked celery, season with salt and a little sugar, 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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 and flavour of the sauce once boiled until tender.
Butter
Softens the onions in fat, building a mellow base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, coating sauce.
New milk
Adds creaminess and richness, softening the sauce's texture.
White broth
Provides savoury liquid that cooks the celery and carries its flavour into the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually mixing in the broth and boiling milk. Adding liquid slowly to flour-thickened fat lets starch granules separate and swell evenly. Adding it all at once can leave lumps that a sieve must then remove.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, parsley, thyme, ham, butter, flour, milk):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, parsley, thyme, ham, butter, flour, milk. 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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