Celery is available throughout the year and is at its best from November onwards. In Italy celery is always sold with the leaves attached to the heads. This way, it is easy to see how fresh it is.
An Italian vegetable in origin, and used widely in Italian cooking, celery is a very important flavouring. It is part of the ‘soffritto’, the fried base of most of our risottos and soups.
We always buy celery heads with their leaves attached, as the pale leaves from the centre are excellent in mixed herb leaf salads. It is rather a wasteful vegetable as the outer green, stringy stems are only good for flavouring stocks. It is the inner pale and crisp hearts that we use in our cooking. These hearts are also used raw, sliced into winter salads with other stem vegetables such as fennel, sea kale and artichokes.