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Celery Sauce

A sauce made by boiling celery, then adding a milk roux and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and white pepper work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 853 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Celery Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Wash the celery.

  2. Boil the chopped celery in 1 pint of water with ½ teaspoon of salt until tender, about 30 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, heat ½ pint of milk and add ¼ teaspoon of white pepper to make a cream roux.

  2. Stir the roux into the cooked celery and boil for a moment before serving.

  3. If celery is out of season, use 1 teaspoon of celery salt in the roux.

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 + white peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together853 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  2. Celery + milktop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

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

  3. Milk + white peppertop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,304 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Forms the main body and vegetal flavour of the sauce once cooked until tender.
Milk
Adds creaminess and a smooth, rich texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the milk mixture and keep the boil brief. Milk proteins can scorch on the bottom of the pan or separate and turn grainy at a hard, prolonged boil. Stirring constantly and boiling only for a moment keeps the sauce smooth and creamy.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, white pepper):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, white pepper. 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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