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Celery Cream Purée

A creamy celery and leek soup thickened with potato flour, enriched with ham, butter, milk, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and leek match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,093 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Celery Cream Purée

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Remove the root end from the leeks and slice the white part into a clean saucepan.

  2. Remove the root from the celery and cut the inner stalks into shreds.

  3. Add them to the pan with the leeks.

Make the purée

  1. Add the ham, butter, a pinch of salt, a few white peppercorns, and a bit of mace.

  2. Cook gently for 15 minutes without browning.

  3. Add the stock and skim.

  4. Simmer for about 1.5 hours until it becomes a pulp.

  5. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and return it to the pan.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the milk and cream separately.

  2. Blend the potato flour smoothly with a little cold milk.

  3. Mix the milk and cream with the purée, then add the potato flour mixture 10 minutes before serving.

  4. Serve with diced croutons.

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 + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,093 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Leek + potatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Celery + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

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

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

  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
Gives the purée its main body and characteristic flavour as it cooks down to a pulp.
Leeks
Add a mild onion-like sweetness and bulk to the purée as they soften.
Potato flour
Thickens the purée by absorbing liquid and swelling as it heats, giving a smooth body.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded mouthfeel to the vegetables as they cook gently.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softness, mellowing the purée's texture and flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky, smooth mouthfeel to the finished purée.

The step that matters

Cook gently without browning. Browning the leeks and celery gives harsh, bitter notes and a darker colour, which would spoil the delicate, pale flavour of a white purée. Gentle heat lets the vegetables soften and release their sweetness.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (leek, potato, flour, butter, ham, milk, cream):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against leek, potato, flour, butter, ham, milk, cream. 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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