Skip to main content
Sauce

Celery Sauce

A creamy sauce made from boiled celery, onions, herbs, butter, flour, broth, and milk.

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 the celery

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

  2. Cut the celery into 2-inch pieces and boil them in a little white broth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt the butter and add the onion, parsley, thyme, and ham (if using).

  2. Sweat the mixture until the onions are done.

  3. Stir in the flour to thicken the sauce and mix well over the heat.

  4. Gradually add the broth the celery was boiled in and the boiling milk.

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

  6. Add the cooked celery, 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

Celery
Provides the main flavour and body of the sauce once boiled and added.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.
White broth
Forms the savoury liquid base that gives the sauce its body.
Milk
Adds creaminess and softens the sauce's flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour must be cooked briefly in the melted butter before liquid is added; this removes raw starch taste and lets it thicken smoothly. Adding liquid too quickly or without stirring can leave 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes