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Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from stewed celery, milk, butter, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stew

  1. Cut the hearts of the celery into small pieces.

  2. Stew the celery in cold water for 1 hour, then strain the liquid.

  3. Add the milk to the celery and stew for another hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve to create a pulp.

  2. Gradually mix the pulp with the melted butter.

  3. Add a pinch of nutmeg before serving.

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

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

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

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

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Celery + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

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

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 the sauce's distinctive vegetable flavor after long stewing and sieving.
Milk
Adds softness and a creamy richness to the stewed celery.
Butter
Adds fat that gives the pulp a smooth, rich mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Gradually mix the pulp with the melted butter. Adding the melted butter slowly lets it disperse evenly into the warm pulp. Dumping it in all at once can cause it to separate, leaving the sauce greasy and grainy rather than smooth.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, nutmeg. 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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