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Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from celery, onion, parsley, thyme, butter, flour, broth, milk, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Strip the outer parts of the celery stems.

  2. Wash the remaining portion of the celery.

  3. Cut the celery into 2-inch pieces.

  4. Boil the celery in a small amount of white broth until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onion thinly.

  2. Place the sliced onion in a stewpan with parsley, thyme, and ham (if using).

  3. Sweat the mixture in butter until the onions are done.

  4. Stir in flour to thicken the sauce.

  5. Mix the sauce well.

  6. Gradually add the broth from the celery and enough boiling milk to achieve desired consistency.

  7. Let the sauce boil for 20 minutes.

  8. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

  9. Add the cooked celery, salt, and sugar.

  10. Serve hot.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Celery + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

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

  4. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the bulk of the sauce and gives it its characteristic flavor and body.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries aroma into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquid, giving it body.
White broth
Cooks the celery and forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Milk
Adds creaminess and smoothness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the butter and onion. Flour must be cooked into the fat and mixed well before liquid is added; otherwise it clumps and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, parsley, thyme, ham, butter, flour, milk):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, parsley, thyme, ham, butter, flour, milk. 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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