Celery was once a winter remedy against scurvy and an Egyptian funeral garland
Before it became a diet snack, celery decorated ancient Egyptian funeral garlands and was grown as a cold-season cleanser for people living on salted meat. Its name appears in Linear B as se-ri-no. Those stringy bits you pull from a stalk are bundles of supporting cells running alongside its veins.
Celery belongs to Apium graveolens, in the same family as carrots, and has been eaten since antiquity; literary evidence places its cultivation in Ancient Greece. Centuries of breeding split it into three groups: stalk celery for its ribbed leaf stalks, leaf celery for aromatic foliage, and celeriac for its swollen hypocotyl, the stem zone just above the root. Carl Linnaeus described the species in 1753. The English word first appeared in print as sellery, spelled that way by John Evelyn in 1664, and travelled from Greek selinon through Latin, Italian and French.
Its signature taste and smell come chiefly from two compounds, butylphthalide and sedanolide. Growers once raised seedlings, then planted them in deep trenches and heaped soil around the stems to block light, a process called blanching. Self-blanching varieties now dominate. English growers first treated it as a winter and early spring vegetable, and by the 19th century its season there ran from September to late April. In North America the Pascal cultivar leads commercial production.
Uniform growth means a field is harvested in a single pass, with stalks packed 36 to 48 to a carton weighing up to 27 kg. Chilled to 0 to 2 degrees Celsius, celery keeps up to seven weeks. Restaurants used to hold it in water with sulfite preservatives until those were found to trigger reactions, and in 1986 the US Food and Drug Administration banned sulfites on produce meant to be eaten raw.
Celery itself is a notable allergen, severe enough that the European Union and the United Kingdom require labelling even for traces. It is 95 percent water, with 14 calories per 100 grams and a useful dose of vitamin K. Cooks prize it as a foundation: with onions and bell peppers it forms the holy trinity of Cajun and Creole cooking, and with onions and carrots it becomes French mirepoix or, slowly cooked in olive oil, Italian soffritto.
Source: Celery
