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Savory Celery

A stew of tender celery simmered in stock with onion juice, salt, pepper, parsley, and thickened with roux.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Savory Celery

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Select the whitest and tenderest celery stalks.

  2. Soak them in ice-water.

  3. Cut the outer, coarser stalks into three-inch lengths.

Stew

  1. Stew them in stock with onion juice, salt, pepper, and parsley for one hour, covered.

  2. Drain the celery in a colander.

  3. Return the stock to the fire.

  4. When the stock boils, add the reserved stalks cut into short lengths.

  5. Cook gently until tender.

Thicken and serve

  1. Thicken the mixture with a spoonful of roux.

  2. Boil briefly.

  3. Serve.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Celery stalks
Form the bulk of the stew and give it a tender, vegetable texture as they cook.
Stock
Provides the liquid base that cooks the celery and carries the flavour of the dish.
Roux
Thickens the cooking liquid so the stew becomes a body rather than a thin broth.

The step that matters

Adding the roux. Roux thickens by starch swelling in hot liquid. Added to liquid that is not hot enough, or stirred in unevenly, it leaves lumps or a floury taste, so the stock should be boiling and well stirred when it goes in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, pepper, parsley):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, pepper, parsley. 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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