Skip to main content
Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from celery, butter, flour, milk, and cream, seasoned with nutmeg, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the celery thoroughly and slice it thinly.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the celery, butter, nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew slowly until the celery dissolves without browning.

  2. Stir in the flour and mix well.

  3. Add the milk and boil for 20 minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Warm it up again, stir in the cream, and serve.

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the body and main flavour of the sauce as it breaks down during stewing.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the celery stews without browning.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and milk.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the boiling reduces.
Cream
Adds smoothness and richness when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stew slowly without browning. Browning gives the celery and butter a toasted, bitter flavour that spoils the pale, delicate sauce. Low, gentle heat lets the celery soften and dissolve into the butter instead.

Swap the celery

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

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

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

More celery sauce recipes

White 5Brown 3for Boiled Turkey 3for Turkey 3 See all 250 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes