If Canada had a flavour, comedian Mike Myers once said, it would be celery. He could have been on to something there. The crunchy veggie traces its ancestry, as do a considerable proportion of Canada’s inhabitants, back to Eurasian origins.
According to Prosper Montagne in the 1938
Larousse Gastronomique, while used a great deal by the Romans, celery did not come into cultivation until the sixteenth century. In this he is right – and wrong. The Romans, as did the Greeks and Egyptians before them, certainly used celery but preferred the wild form that had its origins in marshes close to the coast. All the ancients appreciated celery not so much as a vegetable so much as for its alleged pharmacological properties. Wild celery has been found woven into garlands in Egyptian tombs of the twentieth dynasty. The Egyptians also used celery stalks to treat impotence, anticipating Madame Pompadour who, with celery’s rumoured aphrodisiac effect in mind, fed Louis XV on celery soup, recorded that writer of many things vegetable, Rebecca Rupp. Apicus, the Roman bon vivant, recommended wearing a wreath of celery to alleviate the effects of the previous night’s indulgences. Other Romans sought to treat their constipation with it.
It was a grim time for celery through the European Dark Ages – said to have been so-called because there were so many knights. But it hung on in monastery medicinal gardens, the seeds prescribed as a carminative, diuretic, and aphrodisiac to emerge as the Italian Renaissance progressed as an esteemed vegetable. Along with bookkeeping, table forks and tomatoes, among other things Italian in origin, it made its way across the English Channel to be recorded in 1538 as growing in the Venetian ambassador’s garden in the City of London.
It is not the easiest of crops to raise. This probably accounts for its notable absence from home vegetable gardens despite its being in the ‘Top 10’ of preferred vegetables. As would be suspected from its marsh-side origins it requires constant moisture without flooding in a well-drained sandy soil heavy in organic matter.
Apium graveolens var.
dulce requires considerably longer than most other vegetables to mature, at least 120 frost-free days from germination.
All of this goes some way to explain why in 2013, celery from the Cambridgeshire Fens in eastern England joined Melton Mowbray pork pies in winning special protection under EU labelling laws. The gourmet celery is the 55th British food product to earn recognition for its quality, history and links to a specific local area. Not bad for a food that is 95 percent water.
Celery seed to be used as a condiment derives mainly from a wild form of the biennial. Produced from a profusion of white flowers, the seed is tiny – it takes around 750,000 of them to weigh a single pound. On the home herb shelf, celery seed adds zing to tomato juice, sauces, soups, pickles, pastries and salads. Commercially, the seed is steam distilled to yield a light yellow essential oil, used to flavour food products as well as in liqueurs, perfumes, and soaps.
In the United States, February is proclaimed as ‘Celery Month’ for reasons best known to themselves. Celery tonic, however, is the result of good old U.S. know-how dating back to Brooklyn in 1869 and one Dr. Brown. He sold the soda water flavoured with crushed celery seeds under the modest name of Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. According to Rebecca Rupp, nowadays it’s called Cel-Ray and is made by Canada Dry. And, as we all know, with apologies to Mike Myers, Obama drinks Canada dry.
