Celery Information

Photo: flickr user The Library of Congress

Ingredients

The best supporting veggie is celery

Preparation

On this, the first day of spring, we lick our chops at the start of California's spectacular seasons of fruits and vegetables.

Celery is never mentioned.

Yet the versatile year-round vegetable and its sibling, celeriac, are popping up in restaurants as if they were arugula or Meyer lemons.

'I think it is underutilized,' says Bart Hosmer, executive chef at Bradley Ogden's snazzy new Parcel 104 in Santa Clara, where it appears in everything from salad to mashed potatoes. 'But chefs are starting to prepare celery differently.'

When we think of celery at all, many of us recall ants on a log (raisins dotting peanut butter mushed into a canoe of celery). Or celery slathered with cream cheese. Too many think celery without topping is all water and string.

Tasteless and annoying.

'What's the point of celery?' said the teenage critic in my house.

In fact, celery is a go-along, get-along vegetable. Cook or eat raw.

Everything - roots, seeds and stems - can be used.

'You just throw it in the soup because your grandmother did,' says Jeff Pieracci, co-owner of Galli Produce in San Jose. 'It's the ultimate accompaniment, never in the spotlight, but always there.'

Even more than usual right now. With a freeze in Yuma, Ariz., taking out much of the winter crop of leaf lettuces, what's left is very costly. At wholesale, 'iceberg is $50 a case, if you can find it. Celery is $17,' Pieracci says.

But it's not just price that is driving celery's new appearance. Chefs cite its flavor and versatility.

In her newest cookbook, 'Lidia's Italian-American Kitchen,' restaurant owner and PBS star Lidia Bastianich includes no less than eight celery recipes and a section of advice on which cheeses to pair with celery (Parmigiano-Reggiano or room-temperature Gorgonzola). Bastianich braises, bakes, pickles and makes a sweet-and-sour marinade of simple celery.

With 20 calories to the cup, celery long has been shunted to the diet side of life. As Pieracci says, 'You can eat 10 ribs of celery and still be hungry.'

Celery and celeriac are the two cultivated types of wild celery, which dates back to a mention in Homer's 'Odyssey,' when it was called selinon. Modern names grew from there, says Alan Davidson in 'The Oxford Companion to Food.'

Ancient Greeks and Egyptians may have given celery its unhappy 'good for you' connotation by using it for medicinal and religious purposes. The Chinese began cultivating a thinner, juicier version in the 5 th century AD.

Howard Bulka, executive chef of Marche in Menlo Park, is a fan of celeriac, which he learned to appreciate while living in France. The ugly brown knob is not, as is commonly thought, the root of the pale green stalks stocked even by mini marts. It is a special type of celery cultivated specifically for its root. and it's equally cheap and nearly as available as celery.

'In France, celery root is a much-loved vegetable accompaniment to roasted meats, particularly poultry and game birds, and is often used raw in a salad with remoulade dressing to accompany charcuterie or as part of a composed salad,' Bulka wrote in an e-mail.

But Bulka prefers his root raw. 'The flavor is most pronounced and the texture is crisp and refreshing, much like cabbage in coleslaw.'

At Marche, he uses celery root remoulade to cut the richness of a foie gras appetizer and as an accompaniment to the house smoked salmon. Cooked to a silky puree, celeriac rests alongside roasted Sonoma squab. And in a classic sauce perigourdine, celery root becomes redolent with black truffles.

At Parcel 104, Hosmer also loves the 'soft, floral sweetness' of celery root in soups, folded into mashed potatoes, pureed as the starch for a meat such as lamb chops. At lunch, he pairs celery salad with a grilled, butterflied lamb sandwich, kalamata olives and goat cheese. Sometimes he'll do a light braise of local, organic celery.

Even though celery is showing up in all the right places, it's still not getting top billing. Menus rarely dare speak its name. 'It is not a big driver in sales,' Hosmer says. 'But people like it and will ask: What flavor is that?

How can that be celery?'