Celery for the Salad Course
A blessing on a stalk of celery.
Study that picture below. It was made in 1860 and shows one of the miracles of western horticulture, a foul weed transmuted by the gardener’s art into a wand of pleasure.
Wild celery sprang up in the ditches of Europe, coarse, woody, hollow, and sometimes poisonous. Yet noting how animals ate it, gardeners, particularly Italian gardeners, took it up. In the 1600s they transformed the plant, making it less leafy, adding heft to the stalks, making those stalks sweet, juicy, crisp and fresh flavored. It took 180 years to create the vegetable that we recognize today. And carelessness in the garden can case the 180 years of care to vanish in a growing season. For if you grow it from seed and mistreat it, it reverts to its rank, wild state—leafy, rangy, and lacking the pale succulent heart. In the 18th century, the perfection of varieties that would blanch—that is, for the heart to grow tender and pallid—made the celery a consumption novelty, the adornment of the cosmopolitan table. These early varieties—the rose, and the solid white—were treated like white asparagus—transplanted while young and arranged in a field of deep soil with the stalk buried in mounded earth so the sunlight would not trigger chlorophyll production in the ribs. The blanched ribs were crisp, yet tender.
Ghostly celery ribs became a signature salad of the early 19th century, served in crystal flutes and eaten with a pinch of salt.
Celery culture prior to 1880 was an elaborate process, beginning with sprouting seed in hot beds. The beds were watered twice and week and opened in the mornings, covered and shaded by mats through the afternoon. The mats are removed at 4:00 pm. When the plants have grown several interests they are pulled from the hot bed and transplanted into the trenched fields. The trenched were two feet deep and one foot wide. The bottom foot of the trench was filled with manure intermingled with soil. Into this the plants would be place spaced a foot apart. When the stalks have multiplied and become well established they were banked with soil. Certain places in the United States were found to have the sort of rich muck that made blanched celery thrive. Kalamazoo MI was the chief among these, developing a community of Dutch growers that shipped tons of celery from the city in the decade after the Civil War.
In 1881 seedsman Peter Henderson offered the first self-blanching celery variety in the United States, White Plume. The celery heart naturally grew white, as did certain of the leaves. The outer ribs were pale green. He identified white plume as a sport that had appeared in 1878 in a field outside of Newark NJ. The tenderness of the heart of the White plume, a tenderness achieved without banking the plants in mud or soil, marked the inauguration of the great age of home cultivation of celery. White Plume was quickly joined by a European self-blanching variety by Vilmorin, Paris, called Golden Heart. The elimination of 2/3rds of the labor of celery planting led to massive cultivation of the plant, both by home gardeners, and commercial farmers. Kalamazoo MI became the focus of a celery growing region.
A second revolution occurred a decade later—a revolution in taste. Until the early 1890s both the blanched white & rose varieties and the self-blanching white and golden hearted varieties aspired to pale tenderness in the vegetable. The green ribbed Pascal Celery that emerged at the end of the 19th century, pursued an ideal of crispness and juicy solidity. It was unapologetically green. The Giant Pascal celery began appearing in produce stands on both coasts in 1892. California growers saw the variety as their entrée into the market for these popular vegetable, and now Pascal celery dominates the grocery bins.
The other branches of this family—the leafy soup celeries and the bulbous rooted celeriac have been decidedly peripheral elements to the development of this ingredient. Rare and cherished two hundred years ago, it is now a common commodity, part of a chef’s standard mise-en-place and the inevitable item in the home crisper drawer.