Celery

• 1. Introduction

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  Celery is a plant so ordinary that most people slice it without a second thought. Yet in ancient Greece, athletes who won the sacred Nemean Games were crowned not with gold or laurel, but with wreaths of celery. The horses of the Myrmidons, in Homer's Iliad, grazed on wild celery in the marshes of Troy. Pharaoh Tutankhamun, who died in 1323 BCE, was buried with celery leaves woven into his funeral garlands.

  How did a marshy herb from ancient Mediterranean wetlands become the third-most-popular dish listed on New York City restaurant menus in the 19th and early 20th centuries, surpassed only by coffee and tea? What transformed a plant once sacred to the dead into a garnish for a Bloody Mary? And why, in 2019, did a social-media trend around celery juice send prices spiking across the United States?

  The story of Apium graveolens runs from the tombs of pharaohs to the Chicago-style hot dog, from ancient funeral rites to the Louisiana Creole kitchen. It is older, stranger, and more contested than the pale stalks in a grocery-store bunch would ever suggest.

• 2. Roots and Names

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  Carl Linnaeus formally described the species Apium graveolens in Volume One of his Species Plantarum in 1753, but the plant had been circulating through European languages for far longer. The word "celery" first appeared in English in 1664, printed by John Evelyn, who spelled it "sellery." That spelling reveals the word's route: English borrowed from the French céleri, which came from the Italian seleri, plural of selero, which itself derived from the Late Latin selinon.

  That Latin selinon was borrowed directly from the ancient Greek word for celery, rendered in Linear B syllabic script as "se-ri-no." Mycenaean Greek is among the oldest attested forms of the Greek language, which means the name of this vegetable has persisted, in recognizable form, across more than three thousand years of linguistic change.

  The ancient Greek colony of Selinous on Sicily took its very name from wild parsley, a close relative of celery that grew abundantly in the area. Coins minted in Selinous depicted a parsley leaf as the city's symbol. In the Capitulary of Charlemagne, compiled around 800, apium appears alongside other herbs the Frankish emperor wanted grown in his gardens, listed under its folk medicinal uses. At some later point in medieval Europe, celery displaced the older crop called alexanders, gradually taking its place in kitchens across the continent.

• 3. A Symbol of Death and Victory

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  Among the ancient Greeks, celery carried a meaning that had nothing to do with food. It was a chthonian symbol, connected to the underworld and the cycle of death. According to Greek tradition, celery was said to have sprouted from the blood of Kadmilos, the father of the Cabeiri, who were chthonian divinities celebrated in the cult centers of Samothrace, Lemnos, and Thebes. Celery's spicy odor and its characteristically dark leaf color encouraged this association with death and the underworld.

  At Greek funerals, celery leaves were woven into garlands for the dead. The same plant that marked a corpse also crowned the living: the wreaths awarded to victors at the Isthmian Games were originally made of celery before being replaced, at some point, with crowns of pine. Pliny the Elder recorded that in Achaea, winners of the sacred Nemean Games wore garlands of celery as well.

  The archaeological record stretches this symbolic role backward in time. Daniel Zohary and Maria Hopf identified celery leaves and inflorescences among the garlands found in Tutankhamun's tomb. Celery specimens dated to the seventh century BCE were recovered at the Heraion of Samos. M. Fragiska cites an archaeological find of celery dating to the ninth century BCE at Kastanas, though the literary evidence for ancient Greece is described as far more abundant than the physical remains. Whether the earliest finds represent wild or cultivated celery remains an open question; scholars suggest that by classical antiquity, cultivation had clearly begun.

• 4. Breeding for the Table

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  Wild Apium graveolens is bitter, with a strong medicinal character. Getting it onto a European dining table required centuries of deliberate seed selection to reduce that bitterness and increase the plant's natural sugars. By 1699, John Evelyn could recommend it enthusiastically in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, describing "Sellery" as a plant that had formerly been a stranger in England and praising its "high and grateful Taste" as something placed in the middle of the Grand Sallet at the tables of great men and at the feasts of Praetors.

  The original wild species has been selectively bred into three distinct cultivar groups. Stalk celery, known as the Dulce Group, is the familiar form grown for its fibrous edible petioles. Leaf celery, the Secalinum Group, is prized for its aromatic leaves rather than its stalks. Celeriac, the Rapaceum Group, is cultivated for its large, swollen hypocotyl. These are not minor variations but three essentially different crops produced from the same ancestral plant.

  Modern cultivars favor either solid petioles or a large hypocotyl. In North America, commercial production is dominated by the cultivar called Pascal celery. Early celery was considered a cleansing traditional medicine, prescribed to counter the scurvy that resulted from a winter diet heavy in salted meats and lacking fresh produce. In England by the 19th century, the growing season had been extended to run from early September to late April. The development of self-blanching varieties, which do not require the labor-intensive practice of earthing up to block light from the stems, eventually came to dominate both commercial and home-garden markets.

• 5. The American Table

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  Celery arrives in colonial American records as a minor curiosity. The author of a work called A Treatise on Gardening, by a Citizen of Virginia, described it simply as "one of the species of parsley," suggesting it had not yet secured a firm culinary identity. Its first extended treatment in American print came in Bernard M'Mahon's American Gardener's Calendar, published in 1806.

  After the middle of the 19th century, continued breeding for crisp texture and refined taste changed the plant's social standing entirely. Celery became fashionable, served in special celery vases, salted and eaten raw at the table. The New York Public Library's historical menu archive documents just how fashionable it became: celery was the third-most-listed dish on New York City menus during the 19th and early 20th centuries, ranked behind only coffee and tea. Many varieties existed then that have since disappeared, casualties of their difficulty to grow and their inability to ship well over distance.

  One product of that era has proved more durable: Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda, a celery-seed-flavored drink first produced in 1868 in New York, has continued to appear in pop culture ever since. Celery's place in American regional cooking was also secured in this period. Alongside onions and bell peppers, celery forms what Louisiana Creole and Cajun cooking calls the "holy trinity," a foundational aromatic base. Paired with onions and carrots, it makes up the French mirepoix, used as the starting point for sauces and soups.

• 6. Chemistry, Allergy, and Regulation

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  The aroma and flavor that define celery trace to two chemical compounds: butylphthalide and sedanolide. These are responsible for the plant's distinctive smell, which the ancient Greeks found dark and mortuary, and which modern cooks find savory and sharp.

  For a significant minority of people, celery's chemistry is more than an inconvenience. Exposure to celery can cause potentially fatal anaphylactic shock in those with a celery allergy. Pollen-sensitive individuals have also reported gastrointestinal disorders and other symptoms after eating celery root. Celery sits on an OPALS allergy scale rating of 4 out of 10, indicating moderate allergenic potential, with that risk worsened by heavy use of the same plant throughout a garden. Cross-reactions with carrots and ragweed have also been recorded, and celery has caused skin rashes.

  Regulatory responses have followed. In 1986, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned the use of sulfites on fruits and vegetables intended to be eaten raw, after it emerged that sulfites used in restaurant preservative solutions were triggering allergic reactions in some customers. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, any food that contains or may contain celery, even in trace amounts, is legally required to be clearly labeled.

  Celery seeds, which are technically very small fruits rather than true seeds, yield an essential oil used in the perfume industry. That oil contains the compound apiole. The seeds can also be ground with salt to produce celery salt, which seasons the Chicago-style hot dog, contributes to the flavor of Bloody Mary cocktails, and is a component of Old Bay Seasoning. Naturally occurring nitrates in celery work with added salt to cure pork and other processed meats, offering an alternative to industrial curing agents.

• 7. Harvest, Storage, and Juice

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  Commercial celery harvest is highly synchronized. Because fields grow with striking uniformity, a crop is typically harvested just once, when the average plant in the field has reached marketable size. Workers remove and collect the petioles and leaves; celery is then sorted by color, shape, straightness, petiole thickness, stalk and midrib length, and the absence of disease, cracks, splits, insect damage, or rot. Cartons used in commercial packing contain between 36 and 48 stalks and weigh up to 27 kg.

  Under optimal cold-storage conditions, celery can be kept for up to seven weeks at temperatures between 0 and 2 degrees Celsius. Inner stalks may continue to grow if temperatures stay above 0 degrees. Packaging in anti-fogging, micro-perforated shrink wrap can extend shelf life further. Freshly cut petioles decay quickly; processors use sharp blades, gentle handling, and strict sanitation to slow that process.

  For longer preservation, celery stalks can be pickled by boiling them in water and adding vinegar, salt, and vegetable oil. At the other end of the processing spectrum, raw celery is 95 percent water, 3 percent carbohydrates, and 0.7 percent protein, with negligible fat. A 100-gram serving provides 14 calories and delivers 24 percent of the Daily Value for vitamin K.

  In 2019, a trend of drinking raw celery juice swept across the United States, marketed around claims of detoxification. Those claims have no scientific basis. The trend nonetheless produced a measurable spike in celery prices, a reminder that even a vegetable with documented roots in Tutankhamun's tomb can still generate a modern speculative run.