Name: Stewed Celery
Ingredients: 1 head of celery; About 3 pints of stock; Brown sauce

Why it works: Celery and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,360 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Stewed Celery

Ingredients

1 head of celery
About 3 pints of stock
Brown sauce

Directions

Stew the celery

Cut the celery stalks to about 5 inches in length.
Stew the celery in the stock until tender.

Sauce and serve

Serve the celery in a vegetable dish, coated with brown sauce.
Add some of the stock used for stewing the celery to the brown sauce and boil down to the desired thickness.

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.

Celery + saucetop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,360 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 becomes tender when stewed.
Stock: Moistens and gently cooks the celery, and later flavours and thickens the sauce when reduced.
Brown sauce: Coats the celery and adds savoury flavour and body to the dish.

“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.