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Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from celery, onion, herbs, and butter, thickened with flour and finished with broth and milk.

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 pieces in a small amount of white broth until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the onion, parsley, thyme, and ham (if using); sweat until the onions are done.

  2. Stir in the flour to thicken the sauce, then gradually mix in the celery broth and the boiling milk.

  3. Let the mixture boil for 20 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve.

  4. Add the cooked celery, salt, and sugar, and serve hot and thick.

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
Provides the main flavour and, once cooked and strained, the body of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the aromatics in the pan and adds richness to the sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquids, giving it a smooth, thick texture.
White broth
Cooks the celery and forms the liquid base that gives the sauce its savoury depth.
Milk
Adds creaminess and mild sweetness, softening the savoury flavour of the sauce.
Onion
Sweats in butter to release sweet, aromatic flavour into the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour before adding liquid. Flour must be cooked briefly in the melted butter and whisked in gradually with the broth and boiling milk to avoid lumps and to thicken the sauce evenly.

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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