40 Fun Facts About Celery

On historic New York City menus, celery was once the third most popular dish, behind only which two items?

Coffee and tea alone outranked it in the New York Public Library's menu archive, from the decades when crisp raw stalks were a fashionable dish to salt and eat by hand.

Garlands containing celery leaves were found in the tomb of which 18th Dynasty pharaoh of ancient Egypt?

Tutankhamun was buried around 1323 BCE with garlands that included celery leaves and flowers, and the ancient Greeks later tied the same plant to death and mourning.

Which brunch cocktail is commonly garnished with a tall celery stalk and seasoned with celery salt?

Bloody Mary recipes spike vodka and tomato with Worcestershire and hot sauce, and celery turns up twice: as the stalk standing in the drink and as celery salt, sometimes on the rim.

Which long-running BBC science fiction series had a 1980s hero who wore a celery stalk on his lapel?

Doctor Who's Fifth Doctor, played by Peter Davison, dressed as an Edwardian cricketer and claimed the celery would turn purple near certain gases, at which point he would eat it.

Which spicy chicken dish from western New York is traditionally served with celery sticks and blue cheese dressing?

Buffalo wings, by the best-known account, were first cooked in 1964 at the Anchor Bar as a quick late-night snack for the owners' son and his friends.

Which children's snack consists of celery sticks filled with peanut butter and dotted with a row of raisins?

Ants on a log first appeared in print under that name in a 1959 Star Tribune article, though nobody knows who first pressed raisins into the peanut butter.

Which salad, created for a New York City hotel's charity ball in 1896, began as just apples, celery and mayonnaise?

Waldorf salad is credited to the hotel's maître d'hôtel, Oscar Tschirky, and the walnuts now thought essential only reached printed recipes decades later.

Raw celery, which has just 14 calories per 100 grams, is about 95 percent which substance?

Water fills so much of the stalk that celery is the usual example of a 'negative-calorie food', a myth: digesting it burns only about 8% of the energy it supplies.

Winter celery was once prized as a remedy for which disease?

Scurvy struck people who spent the cold months on salted meat with no fresh produce, so early-season celery was valued as a cleansing medicine as much as a food.

Which US city's signature hot dog, served on a poppy seed bun, is finished with a dash of celery salt?

Chicago stands took up celery salt because the city once had many celery farms, and one neighbourhood even called itself the celery capital of the world.

In Cajun and Creole cooking, what nickname is given to the base of chopped celery, onions and bell peppers?

The holy trinity swaps the carrots of French cooking for bell peppers, which grew far more easily in Louisiana, and adding garlic is known as adding the pope.

Which classic French flavour base combines two parts onion with one part each of carrot and celery?

Mirepoix is cooked slowly in butter without colouring, and it carries the name of a French duke whom one encyclopaedist dismissed as incompetent and mediocre.

Celery belongs to the plant family Apiaceae along with carrots, fennel and which common garnish herb?

Parsley is such a close relative that a colonial Virginia gardening guide wrote celery off as just another kind of it, and the family is named after celery's genus, Apium.

Celeriac, a knobbly variety of the celery plant popular in European soups, is grown mainly for which part?

Its rounded bulb is really a swollen hypocotyl, white inside, that keeps for six to eight months in cold storage, though the flavour weakens as it ages.

A 2019 American detox fad sent celery prices soaring by urging people to consume the vegetable in which form?

Juiced celery was promoted for 'detoxification', claims with no scientific basis, and the drink has less fibre than the whole stalks it is pressed from.

Traditional gardeners pile soil around celery planted in deep trenches, a practice called blanching, to block out what?

Sunlight makes plants produce green chlorophyll, so the buried stalks stay pale; self-blanching varieties that need no earthing up now dominate the market.

Which US state, whose Salinas Valley is nicknamed America's Salad Bowl, leads the country's celery production?

California's Monterey County alone is credited with over half of the national celery crop, along with most of the leaf and head lettuce.

A celery rib is a petiole, the stalk of a single leaf; which of these crops is eaten for the same part?

Rhubarb sticks are petioles too: in both plants the leaf stalk grows unusually long, so what looks like a stem is really part of a leaf.

Which botanist gave celery its scientific name, Apium graveolens, in his 1753 work Species Plantarum?

Carl Linnaeus's celery later became the type species of its genus, so the whole family that includes carrots and fennel, Apiaceae, is named after it.

In which ancient Greek epic do the horses of Achilles' Myrmidons graze on wild celery during the siege of Troy?

The Iliad is not Homer's only nod to the plant: in his other epic, meadows of violets and wild celery surround the cave of the nymph Calypso.

Supporters of which London football club sing a chant called Celery and once threw the vegetable at matches?

Chelsea banned the vegetable from its Stamford Bridge ground after an incident involving midfielder Cesc Fàbregas at the 2007 League Cup final.

Celery salt is a primary ingredient of which seasoning blend, created in Baltimore in 1939 and used chiefly on crab?

Old Bay takes its name from a steamship line that ran from Baltimore to Norfolk, and celery salt is also reported to be in KFC's secret spice mix.

Cel-Ray, a celery-flavoured soda nicknamed Jewish Champagne in the 1930s, is made by which New York deli brand?

Dr. Brown's first sold it as Celery Tonic, flavoured with celery seed extract, until the Food and Drug Administration objected to the word tonic.

Raw celery is a rich source of just one micronutrient, the one the body needs for blood clotting; which is it?

Vitamin K comes in at about 24% of the Daily Value per 100 grams, and nothing else in the stalk reaches a significant level.

Victors at which ancient Greek festival, named for the place where Heracles slew a lion, won wreaths of wild celery?

Nemean Games winners were crowned by the city of Argos, and the Isthmian festival at Corinth handed out the same leafy wreaths until pine replaced them.

Which Michigan city, home of Western Michigan University, was once noted for the celery grown on its farms?

Kalamazoo has not forgotten the crop: many of its landmarks and hiking trails are still based around the old celery industry.

Victorian hosts showed off raw celery, then a hard-to-grow luxury, at the centre of the table in what?

A glass vase let diners admire the stalks, and such vases were common wedding gifts, often engraved with the newlyweds' names on the bottom.

Celery powder can cure organic bacon and hot dogs because the plant is naturally rich in which compound?

Nitrate in the powder is turned into nitrite by bacterial cultures, which lets producers cure meat without the artificial additive that organic rules forbid.

Celery joins mustard, lupin and sesame on a European Union list of 14 items that labels must flag as what?

Allergens on the list must be emphasised in a product's ingredients, because for people sensitive to celery a reaction can bring on potentially fatal anaphylactic shock.

Wild celery was first bred into a mild table vegetable from the 16th century onward, mainly in which country?

Italy's growers selected seed for generations to cut the sap's bitterness, and when the diarist John Evelyn praised the result in 1699 he still called it apium Italicum.

Which celery cultivar, sharing its name with a French mathematician, dominates commercial growing in North America?

Pascal now rules the supermarket shelf, while many varieties popular a century ago have vanished because they were difficult to grow and did not ship well.

Wild celery, native from Ireland to the western Himalayas, grows naturally in which kind of habitat?

Coastal marshes, tidal riverbanks and sea walls are its natural home, and north of the Alps the wild plant turns up only on soils with some salt in them.

Khoresh karafs, a traditional sour stew built around celery, belongs to which national cuisine?

Iranian cooks traditionally sour the stew with unripe grapes, simmer the celery with lamb or beef, and serve it only with Persian rice.

Which tall garden herb, a celery relative with a stronger flavour, is sometimes ground into celery salt instead?

Lovage can reach 2.5 metres tall, and cooks use every part of it: the leaves as a herb, the roots as a vegetable and the seeds as a spice.

The celery seed sold as a spice, which also yields an oil for the perfume industry, is botanically what?

A tiny dried fruit is the true identity of each so-called seed, and grinding a batch with table salt is all it takes to make celery salt.

Which Frankish emperor's estate decree of around 800 listed celery, as apium, among plants to be grown?

Charlemagne's list also named alexanders, the pot herb that celery later pushed out of medieval European kitchens.

The 'strings' that peel away from a celery rib are bundles of which supportive plant cell type?

Collenchyma cells have irregularly thickened walls that brace young, growing shoots and leaves, and celery strings are the textbook example of them.

The earliest known written form of the word for celery, se-ri-no, appears in which script of Mycenaean Greece?

Linear B survives mainly in palace archives at sites such as Knossos and Pylos, so celery was being written down centuries before Homer put it in his epics.

Celery Victor, a chilled salad of braised celery hearts created by chef Victor Hirtzler in 1910, comes from which city?

San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel employed Hirtzler as head chef, and he is also credited with inventing the seafood salad Crab Louie.

Which ancient Greek city in Sicily, said to be named after wild celery, put the plant's leaf on its coins?

Selinunte echoes selinon, the Greek word that also reached English as 'celery' after passing through Latin, Lombard and French.