Skip to main content
Main

Celery Sauce

A sauce made with flour, batter, milk, and boiled celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the flour with the batter in a bowl.

  2. In a pot, bring the milk to a boil.

  3. Stir the flour and batter mixture into the boiling milk.

Add the celery

  1. Cut the celery into small pieces and boil in water for a few minutes, then strain.

  2. Add the celery to the milk mixture and stir continuously over heat for 5 to 10 minutes.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,905 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + celerytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Its starch swells with heat and thickens the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the thickened sauce is built on and adds richness.
Celery
Gives the sauce its main flavour and soft pieces of vegetable texture.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling milk. Starch clumps when it meets hot liquid all at once. Adding it gradually while stirring keeps the flour dispersed so it thickens evenly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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