Skip to main content
Main

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from celery, onion, herbs, butter, flour, broth, and milk, seasoned with salt and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Strip the outer parts of the celery stems and wash the remaining portion.

  2. Cut the celery into 2‑inch pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, sweat the onion, parsley, thyme, and ham (if using) in butter until the onion is done.

  2. Stir in the flour to thicken the sauce, then gradually mix in the broth the celery was boiled in and the boiling milk.

  3. Let it boil for 20 minutes, then strain through a fine sieve.

Finish

  1. Add the celery back in, season with salt and sugar, and 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

Butter
Carries the aromatics and, with the flour, forms a base that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Starch thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the sauce body.
Onion
Sweats down to build a mellow, savoury flavour base.
Broth
Provides the main savoury liquid that carries the celery flavour into the sauce.
Milk
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Celery
Supplies the main vegetable flavour and fine texture once returned to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the broth and milk to the flour. Flour clumps when it meets liquid unevenly. Adding the hot liquid gradually while stirring lets the starch disperse and gelatinize smoothly, so the sauce thickens without lumps.

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.

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 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes