Skip to main content
Main

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from boiled celery, veal broth, butter, flour, and thick cream or egg yolks, seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Slice the white part from the celery and peel if not very young.

  2. Boil the celery in salted water for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Drain the celery and place it in a saucepan with veal broth or gravy.

  2. Stew until the celery is soft.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix butter with flour and add to the celery.

  4. Stir in thick cream or egg yolks and season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 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 bulk of the sauce as it softens.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce with the butter, giving it body.
Veal broth or gravy
Supplies savoury liquid that carries the celery flavour and moistens the sauce.
Cream or egg yolks
Enriches the sauce and adds creaminess, with egg yolks also helping it set smoothly.

The step that matters

Stir in thick cream or egg yolks. Once the sauce is hot, egg yolks can curdle or scramble if boiled. Adding them off the heat or over gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, butter, flour, cream, pepper, nutmeg. 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.

More celery sauce recipes

White 5Brown 3for Boiled Turkey 3for Turkey 3 See all 250 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipes