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Sauce

Celery Sauce, for Boiled Turkey and Fowls

A sauce made from celery, butter, flour, and seasonings, served with boiled turkey or fowls.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Celery Sauce, for Boiled Turkey and Fowls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Cut the celery into 1½ inch slices.

  2. Season with salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and mace.

  3. Simmer the celery in weak broth or water until tender.

Make and serve the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix butter and white flour to form a paste.

  2. Add the paste to the simmering celery to thicken the sauce.

  3. Stir in lemon juice if desired.

  4. Serve the sauce over the fowls or in a tureen.

  5. For a brown sauce, use browned flour and add red wine.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides the main flavour and, once simmered, the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
White flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked into a paste with butter.
Browned flour
Gives the brown sauce a deeper colour and a toasted, nutty flavour.
Red wine
Adds acidity and depth to the brown sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter-flour paste to the simmering celery. If the paste is added without being smoothly blended, or the liquid is not kept simmering, lumps form and the flour does not thicken evenly. Cooking the flour in the fat for a moment before adding liquid also removes its raw taste.

“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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