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Boiled Celery

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Celery

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Choose well-grown celery heads, trim the roots, and cut into 4-inch pieces.

  2. Wash the celery carefully, then blanch in boiling salted water for a few minutes.

  3. Drain, wash again, and boil gently in well-salted milk and water until tender.

  4. Use the boiling liquid to make a sauce by thickening it with a little flour.

  5. Dish the celery on toast, pour the sauce over, 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Celery + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the celery

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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