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Mrs. Astor’s Dinner Table, Besotted Bees,
A Trimming for Tombs, Boar Sauce,
John Evelyn’s Unfinished Masterpiece,
and Airborne Magicians
Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Celery tonic is still around. Nowadays it’s called Cel-Ray and is made by Canada Dry, but it’s still basically the same brew — soda water flavored with crushed celery seeds — that went on the market in Brooklyn in 1868 as Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. It’s not clear that there ever actually was a Dr. Brown — the name may simply have been invented for customer appeal, like General Mills’s housewifely but nonexistent Betty Crocker. Real or no, however, he was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century celery craze, an enthusiasm that eventually produced not only celery soda, but also celery gum, celery soup, and Elixir of Celery, touted as a treatment for nervous ailments and popular enough to be offered in the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog.
In the Gilded Age, celery was also in vogue on the posh tables of the rich, whose meals, served by footmen, lasted more than two hours and involved twenty-four pieces of silverware and six wine-glasses per place setting. Celery, in the heyday of the Astors and Vanderbilts, was served — not in little flat dishes with the olives, as on everybody’s grandmother’s dinner table — but in towering glass or silver celery vases, such that the leafy tops loomed impressively over the gravy boats, soup tureens, epergnes, and fancy floral centerpieces. Celery, once upon a time, was a fashion statement. It was pricey, and if you had it, you wanted to show it off.
The high cost of celery, which put it well out of the range of the average pocketbook, was due to its labor-intensive mode of cultivation. Nineteenth-century celery was routinely blanched, a whitening and sweetening process that involved piling dirt around the developing stalks to block exposure to sunlight. With the introduction of self-blanching varieties — Burpee’s Golden Self Blanching Celery came on the market in 1884 — celery rapidly became more affordable. It was soon immensely popular across the social board; a late-nineteenth-century French tourist peevishly wrote that the celery-obsessed Americans “almost incessantly nibble” from the beginning to the end of their repasts. Inevitably, as celery entered the common clutches, it lost its prestige, and by the end of the century had been demoted from the boastful vase to the aforementioned unobtrusive flat dish.
The subject of all this social heartburn is a member of the family Apiaceae (along with the related carrots, parsnips, parsley, caraway, coriander, dill, and fennel). Its scientific name, Apius graveolens, derives from the Latin apis, or “bee,” because bees go dotty over its tiny fragrant white flowers. Modern edible celery is believed to have originated in the Mediterranean area and Eurasia, where, in wild form, it established itself in the marsh-lands adjacent to the seacoast. Wild celery is colloquially known as smallage, derived from an older term for celery — ache (pronounced “ash”) — which evolved into the Old English small-ache. More strongly flavored than cultivated celery, smallage today is the source of culinary celery seed.
In ancient times celery was prized as a pharmaceutical, and one linguistic theory holds that its common name derives from its remedial reputation — from the Latin celer, meaning quick-acting or swift, as in celerity and acceleration. Medically, celery has a long and versatile history. The Egyptians used celery stalks to treat impotence; the Romans used them to treat constipation and wore the leafy tops to alleviate hangovers. Apicius, who doubtless suffered many in the course of his expensively decadent career, recommended that morning-after victims “wear a wreath of celery round the brow to ease the pain.” Pliny recommends celery (or parsley) as a treatment for lumbago; and reports that celery (or parsley), tossed in a fish pond, revives sickly fish.
In the Middle Ages, celery was used as a laxative or diuretic, as a treatment for gallstones, and as a palliative for wild animal bites. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was recommended (in tea) for digestive upsets and insomnia, and (in conserve) for chest pains. The nineteenth edition of the Dispensatory of the United States of America (1907) listed a “Compound Elixir of Celery,” recommended for its sleep-inducing and calmative properties, though this may have had less to do with celery than with the elixir’s other ingredients, which included alcohol and cocaine. Madame de Pompadour, with celery’s rumored aphrodisiac effect in mind, fed Louis XV on celery soup, and legendary eighteenth-century lover Giacomo Casanova is said to have eaten celery to improve his sexual stamina.
Some modern research indicates that Casanova, at least, may have had it right. Doctors Mark Anderson, Walter Gaman, and Judith Gaman, coauthors of Stay Young: Ten Proven Steps to Ultimate Health (2010), have dubbed celery “Vegetable Viagra.” The secret, they explain, is androsterone, a naturally occurring steroid found in human sweat and urine, boar saliva, and celery. In people and boars, androsterone acts as a pheromone, which makes the males exuding it more attractive to females. A few stalks of celery before a date, the authors of Stay Young suggest, may be the difference between a cold shoulder and a hot night.
For all its aphrodisiacal potential, celery has some dismal associations. The ancient Greeks associated it with death, trimmed tombs with it, and coined the ominous saying “He now has need of nothing but celery” to mean imminent demise. Seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick, better known for such sensual and upbeat works as “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), wrote a gloomy celery-featuring ditty titled “To Perenna, A Mistress” that begins, “Dear Perenna, prithee come / And with smallage dress my tomb.” Wild celery was found among the funeral garlands in King Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus.
The innocent-seeming celery does indeed have distinctly ominous features. Prominent among these is its content of chemical compounds known as psoralens or furocoumarins. Psoralens, present in appreciable amounts in celery, parsnips, and parsley, are potent photosensitizers — that is, they increase the sensitivity of the skin to sunlight. In combination with ultra-violet irradiation, psoralens have been used therapeutically to treat vitiligo — a skin depigmentation condition — and psoriasis, a chronic and miserable inflammatory skin disease. (Psoralen shares a root with the Greek psoraleos, “mangy,” and psora, “itch.”) The drawback is that such treatments must be strictly limited, since psoralens are also photocarcinogens, with the potential for causing skin cancers.
In healthy celery, psoralens are present at relatively low levels and pose no threat to the human hide. Sick celery, however, is a different matter. The plant produces psoralens in response to microbial invasion; thus diseased plants possess ten to one hundred times more of these molecules than their germ-free relatives, potentially dangerous concentrations. And then there are parsnips (Pastinaca sativa), which, even in the pink of health, are comparatively swimming in psoralens. Consumption of 0.1 kg of parsnip (a mere 3½ ounces) necessarily involves ingesting 4 to 5 mg of assorted psoralens, a potentially risky quantity unless one lives in a lightless cellar. The chief psoralens in celery, bergapten and xanthotoxin, are capable, even at normal, low levels, of inducing severe allergic reactions, frequently afflicting celery harvesters and growers and ranging in severity from hives to outright anaphylactic shock.
Similarly implicated in celery allergies is apiol, the essential aromatic oil of the celery plant, most highly concentrated in the spicy seeds. Apiol’s major constituent is a terpene compound called limonene, also present in citrus fruits and various mints. (Limonene, the bête noire of the fruit juice industry, turns bitter in processing, and has therefore inspired a scientific and industrial scramble to develop low-limonene oranges and grapefruits.) The allergic reaction is said to be exacerbated by exercise, a good argument for lying quietly on the couch while chewing celery stalks. Apiol, since the days of Hippocrates, has also been known to induce abortion, and was used as an effective, but frighteningly toxic, abortifacient into the mid-twentieth century.
In the culinary sense, apiol is a much more desirable proposition, giving celery and parsley their distinctive flavor. In the celery plant, it is concentrated in the seeds and in cavities between the cells of the leaves, which is why leafy celery tops are often used to flavor soups. The Romans loved it, and used celery seeds (preferably the wild, stronger-flavored variety) as a condiment. The author of Apicius sprinkled them liberally in a sauce to be served with wild boar.
Snow White Celery
The practice of blanching celery began in France in the reign of Louis XIV, under the direction of Jean de la Quintinie in the Sun King’s kitchen garden at Versailles. Sweeter, tenderer, and snow white, as opposed to the green sun-soaked norm, blanched celery quickly became the dietary standard. The earliest blanching techniques, also applied to rhubarb and endive, involved “earthing up,” or piling soil around the growing stalks. Later growers employed earthenware blanchers, large bell-jar-shaped pots with removable lids.
With the decline and fall of Rome, celery fell from public view. It was resurrected as an edible, according to food historians, only in the sixteenth century, and then by way of Italy, where the hefty wide-stalked varieties similar to those around today were originally developed. The Reverend William Turner chattily mentions Italian celery in his Herbal of 1538: “The first I ever saw was in the Venetian Ambassador’s garden in the spittle yard, near Bishop’s Gate Streete.” (Spittle, less repulsive than it sounds, was an early English term for garden spade.) John Parkinson was not enthusiastic about it — “its evil taste and savour doth cause it not to be accepted in meates as Parsley.”
By Parkinson’s time, however, the culinarily adept French were in the midst of developing an elaborate celery cuisine. A recipe of 1659 describes a dish of celery cooked with lemon, pomegranates, and beets. Celery hearts — the fused base where the stalks meet — were esteemed; and the leafy stalks themselves were eaten as delicacies with dressings of oil and pepper.
By 1699, British diarist and prolific writer John Evelyn had adopted the cause of “Sellery.” In his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, he praises the “high and grateful Taste” of celery, peeled, sliced, and eaten with “Oyl, Vinegar, Salt and Peper” (though he warns diners that small red worms often lurk in the stalks). Evelyn was an early proponent of the “Herby-Diet” — that is, vegetarianism.
Acetaria, a spin-off from a far more ambitious work, was originally intended as a mere chapter in Evelyn’s three-volume, one-thousand-plus-page Elysium Britannicum, or The Royal Garden, a comprehensive account of the practices and principles of seventeenth-century gardening. The book as planned was to include detailed chapters on soils and composts, waterworks, nurseries, and bowling greens, orangeries and aviaries, garden statuary, a plan for revamping cemeteries, and a horticultural book list.
Though Evelyn worked on the project for 50 years, it was never published, and after his death Christ Church Library, Oxford, acquired the manuscript — an intimidating mishmash of text; loose notes; pasted-in addenda; DIY instructions for constructing a “Transparent Bee-Hive,” a garden “Thermoscope or wheather-Glass,” and an artificial echo; and original sketches, among them a nice diagram of a tarantula. In the year 2000, Evelyn’s magnum opus — or at least the surviving third of it — finally appeared in print, painstakingly deciphered and transcribed by John Ingram of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, some 300 years after the publication of Acetaria — originally slated to appear in Book II, Chapter XX, as “Of Sallets.”
By 1699, British diarist John Evelyn had adopted the cause of “Sellery,” which he praised for its “high and grateful Taste.”
Cultivated celery, Apius graveolens var. dulce, eaten today for its crunchy stalks, is certainly the vegetable recommended by Evelyn for his Sellery salad. Botanically speaking, the scrumptious stalks are leaf petioles rather than true stems — structural equivalents of the “stems” that attach conventional leaves to the branch of a tree. The other cultivated celery, A. graveolens var. rapaceum, also known as knob- or turnip-rooted celery or celeriac, features a starch-swollen lower stem (not root). The scientific name rapaceum reflects the necessary harvesting technique — unlike the more docile garden celery, celeriac clings to Mother Earth and has to be ripped from the ground by force.
Historically, it caught on best in Germany and France, where it was usually served up boiled. Stephen Switzer, an eighteenth-century English gardener and garden writer, obtained celeriac from an importer of “curious seeds,” who in turn had procured it from Alexandria. Switzer grew some, and included it in his 1729 treatise titled “A compendious method for the raising of Italian broccoli, Spanish cardoon, celeriac, finochi and other foreign vegetables,” which suggests that it was at that time a vegetable oddity.
The European colonists brought celery with them to America, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, since the climate, north or south, never seemed to suit it. The gardeners of Massachusetts Bay reported that their “Celary” roots rotted over the winter, and Thomas Jefferson recorded similarly unhappy results at Monticello. Somebody eventually managed to grow it, however: talented Philadelphia horticulturalist and seedsman Bernard M’Mahon (or McMahon) — to whom Jefferson initially entrusted the plant collections of the Lewis and Clark expedition — lists four varieties common to American gardens in 1806, though it certainly never reached such heights of commonness as the bean, the pea, and the onion.
Commercial celery didn’t appear until the mid-nineteenth century, the successful stock imported from Scotland to Kalamazoo, Michigan (now “Celery City”) by an enterprising Scotsman named George Taylor in 1856. (Anti-Taylor sources claim the crucial seed arrived with a green-thumbed Dutch immigrant in the 1870s.)
Burpee’s 1888 catalog offered ten varieties of celery, including the Incomparable Crimson and the White Walnut, so named for its rich, nutty flavor, plus celeriac or turnip-rooted celery which, Mr. Burpee adds truthfully, in parentheses, is really shaped like an apple. Until the 1930s most celery in this country was sold blanched and white, but the most likely denizen of the supermarket vegetable bins today is a variety called Pascal, which is green.
As a food source, celery is so pathetic that diet dogma holds that it has “negative calories” — that is, it takes more energy to chew and digest it than it provides in the first place.
Celery is still characteristically eaten crisply raw, much as advised by the omniscient Ladies’ Home Journal in 1891, which directed:
“Celery should be scraped and washed and then put in iced water, to be made crisp, at least an hour before it goes on the table. It is now served in long, flat glass dishes. It should be put on the table with the meat and other vegetables, and is to be removed before the dessert is served.”
In crisply raw form, there’s not much to it. Celery is 95 percent water, and the average stalk delivers just 10 dietary calories. As a food source, celery is so pathetic that diet dogma holds that it has “negative calories” — that is, it takes more energy to chew and digest it than it provides in the first place. Sadly, this isn’t actually true. Neither is the equally hopeful theory of Leonard J. Kelly of New York City, who hypothesized that very cold beer has negative calories, due to the energy expenditure exerted by the beer-drinking body in warming it up.
Celery also tends to be finicky to grow, though if you’ve got the right combination of temperature and soil, you can get a lot of bang for your buck: a single ounce of celery seed is enough to plant a full acre of celery. Failing that, the possibilities are even more exciting. Medieval magicians, the story goes, tucked celery seeds in their shoes in order to fly.