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Celery Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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.

  2. Peel the celery if it is not very young.

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

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

Make the sauce

  1. Stew until the celery is soft.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix butter with flour.

  3. Add the butter-flour mixture and cream or egg yolks to the celery.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

Serve

  1. Serve hot in a tureen.

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 body of the sauce as the stewed vegetable.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Flour
Mixed with butter to thicken the sauce as it stews.
Cream or egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and add body, giving a thicker, smoother texture.
Veal broth or gravy
Supplies the liquid base and savoury depth for stewing the celery.

The step that matters

Adding the butter-flour mixture and cream or egg yolks. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid to thicken without lumps. Egg yolks can curdle if boiled, so they should be added off the heat or gently warmed rather than allowed to boil.

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.

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