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Cream Celery

A creamy celery side made with milk, butter, flour, cream, and crushed crackers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cream Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the celery

  1. Bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Add the chopped celery.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the butter with the flour.

  2. Add the mixture to the pot.

  3. Stir in the cream and crushed crackers.

  4. Season with salt to taste 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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the creamy sauce.
Celery
Provides the main vegetable flavor and a tender-crisp texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Its starch swells with heat and thickens the milk into a sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, heavier body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the pot. Flour clumps when it hits hot liquid unless it is well mixed with fat first and stirred in evenly. Starch only thickens fully once the liquid is hot, so the sauce should be kept at a simmer while it is stirred, and it can gradually loosen if cooked too long.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, 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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