Maya Kroth: At the end of the 19th century, there's this urban legend that boys in Kalamazoo would show up to dates bearing stocks of celery with a ribbon tied around them instead of a bouquet of roses.

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Dan Pashman: This is Maya Kroth, she’s a freelance writer and independent radio producer. She got obsessed with celery. 

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] It’s a phrase I never thought I would hear used to describe me either, but yeah. After you write thousands of words about celery I guess you become an obsessive.

Dan Pashman: It kinda happened by accident. It all started when Maya was writing a piece on the history of the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, also known as Celery City… 

Maya Kroth: I was researching the history of Kalamazoo and. Its claim to fame originally was that it was this world celery capital. Like Kalamazoo celery was known all over the country. It was served in the finest restaurants in New York City ... 

Dan Pashman: Maya fell down a celery rabbit hole, which is only slightly less ironic than a carrot rabbit hole.

Maya Kroth: And I came across this book by a British journalist named George Augustus Sala. He was traveling through the U.S. in around 1879. And he talks a lot about celery. [MARKET AMBIANCE] Like he goes to a market in New York and he notices there is an “inexhaustible plentitude of the health giving celery which American diners almost incessantly nibble on from the beginning to the end of their repasts.” And I'm just like I'm trying to envision [VICTORIAN MUSIC] this Victorian table with all these fancy lords and ladies like nibbling on — seems so weird. And he talks about stewed celery, raw celery, mashed celery ... It really comes up in this manuscript a lot. He's on a steamship across the Atlantic and he notices American women are obsessively munching on celery all the time and he wonders if they think, you know, “in their feminine mind” if they think that celery cures seasickness. So there was all this intrigue in celery that it has these magical powers and people are really, really into it. 

Dan Pashman: So what happened? Why aren’t fancy foodies today having breathless conversations about the latest variety of artisanal celery? And can it make a comeback?

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters. I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. Today on The Sporkful, the rise, fall, and possible redemption of celery. 

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Dan Pashman: This story comes to us from our friends at the America’s Test Kitchen podcast Proof. We loved it so much we wanted to share it with you. So let’s get into it. 

Dan Pashman: Celery does not get a lot of love these days. Meanwhile, other vegetables that everyone used to hate are everywhere. How did that happen? There’s a classic Portlandia sketch that puts forth one theory. They imagine a top secret organization called Produce Sales Headquarters.

[PORTLANDIA CLIP]

CLIP (PERSON 1): It's been a good year ... Heirloom tomatoes — didn't even exist five years ago. Now, eaten like steaks ... Kale consumption is at an all time high. [APPLAUSE] Excellent work, Larry. [LAUGHING] ... And brussel sprouts are back!

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CLIP (PERSON 1): I don't know how you did it, Bill.

CLIP (BILL): Ah, they sell themselves.

CLIP (PERSON 1):Which brings us ... to celery ... Yes, Mario. I'm talking about you.

CLIP (MARTY): Oh, yeah ... Doing the best I can out here.

CLIP (PERSON 1): Cause your numbers are down.

CLIP (MARTY):  Yeah.

CLIP (PERSON 1): Look at this graph.

CLIP (MARTY):  Oh. Well, cause my graph ...

CLIP (PERSON 1): That's you down here.

CLIP (MARTY): Ah, I don't have that same graph.

CLIP (PERSON 1): Oh.

CLIP (MARTY): Did you ever hear of a thing called Bloody Marys?

Dan Pashman: That just about sums it up. But celery hasn’t always been a punchline. As reporter Maya Kroth will tell us. So I’m gonna hand things over to Maya. And before she tells you the story of how celery got where it is today, and where it might go in the future, she’s gotta spend a little more time making clear just how much people loved celery before. Because so far, you haven’t heard the half of it.

Maya Kroth: So my climb to the top of the great mountain of celery knowledge began at the NYPL. They have this collection of 17,000 restaurant menus.

[NEW YORK LIBRARY AMBIANCE]

Rebecca Federman: The menus are from all over the world, but primarily they're really the focus is on New York City. And they range from the middle of the 19th century to the early 2000s.

Maya Kroth: This is Rebecca Federman. She’s a librarian at the New York Public Library. And she became my first guide on this celery quest. So a few years back, they put all those menus online and they asked the public to help transcribe them. And that’s when they started making connections.

Rebecca Federman: So when you look at the popularity of the dishes that appear over time, coffee is number one, tea is number two, and then to the surprise of many celery is number three. 

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Maya Kroth: Appearing on how many menus?

Rebecca Federman: 4,246 menus. 

[CELERY CRUNCH SOUND EFFECT]

Maya Kroth: That means celery was a featured item on 1 out of 4 menus and it comes in so many different forms on these menus. There was celery-fed duckling, mashed celery, fried celery, celery tea, and an appetizer called cold jelly essence of celery. I mean, they were really getting creative with celery. And the prices ...

Rebecca Federman: 35 Cents for celery, 10 cents for radishes.

Maya Kroth: And I see caviar for 25 cents?

Rebecca Federman: Caviar, for 25 cents. 

Maya Kroth: So there was a time when celery was more expensive than caviar?

Rebecca Federman: [LAUGHS] According to this menu.

[LAUGHING] 

Dan Pashman: Okay, Maya. I gotta jump in here for a second because I got a couple questions. 

Maya Kroth: Okay. Shoot.

Dan Pashman: So, all right, clearly, celery was a big deal in fancy restaurants. But were people also eating it at home?

Maya Kroth: I mean, rich people definitely were when they got tired of caviar, I guess?

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS]

Maya Kroth: And you know, the Victorians, they loved to have specific utensils for everything, right? Like, millions of different little, tiny forks and spoons. But celery was this special thing. It was a status symbol. So if you lived in an upper class household in the east coast in the last part of the 19th century, it's pretty likely that you had some very expensive cut crystal vase whose only job was to show off your celery. It'd be displayed, like, right in the center of the table, like a bouquet of flowers almost.

Dan Pashman: I picture, like, Remains of the Day level table setting, but with celery in the middle.

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] Yes, something like that.

Dan Pashman: And so, but here's the other thing I don't understand. Was celery so precious just because it was trendy or were there, like, tangible economic reasons or other reasons why celery should be so special?

Maya Kroth: No, there were definitely reasons. First of all, the celery that was most popular back then was kind of different from the celery you might be thinking of, the celery you'd buy in the supermarket today. The most fashionable celery back then was white.

Dan Pashman: Huh? Like, all around the outside? Like, they weren't even green on the outside?

Maya Kroth: Yeah, like I would see — when I was researching the Kalamazoo thing, I found all these postcards from the time, you know, like, "Come visit Kalamazoo, Celery City", and there was just this bright white stalk of celery with green leaves on the top. And this was kind of the platonic ideal of celery. And you know, I don't know if you've ever tried to, like, grow anything in your garden that requires blanching?

Dan Pashman: I have tried to grow many things, Maya, but never succeeded.

Maya Kroth: Likewise.

[LAUGHING]

Maya Kroth: I would be the world's worst celery farmer, okay? Because the way — what I understand about how they needed to grow this white celery is just this really laborious process that requires, like, piling dirt up on the sides of the stalks so that it just stays underground or, you know, these guys told me about carrying 2x4's out to the celery patch at, like, 5 o'clock in the morning and setting it up so that these 2x4's are providing shade for the celery, so that, I don't know, like, the chlorophyll doesn't get activated or something? I don't know.

Dan Pashman: Right! Okay! Yeah, yeah. I heard, like, they do something similar with endive to keep it pale. Like you said, you're basically keeping the chlorophyll from activating.

Maya Kroth: Yeah, exactly. They had all these different methods but blanching was kind of the name of the game back then. And I think this part of why celery was such, like, a rarified status symbol thing, why it was so expensive back then. That and it's just hard to grow even without the blanching, like it's vulnerable to all kinds of pests and plagues, and it's finicky in terms of, like, where it can grow, how much water it needs. So all of this is combining to help us understand why celery was such a big deal, why it might have even been more expensive than caviar.

Dan Pashman: Okay, Maya, what happened? How did celery go from being the caviar of vegetables to the celery of vegetables?

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] Well, two things happened. First, like anything, it just went out of style. You know, trends come and go. People want something new. I'm sure it'll happen to kale someday, right?

Dan Pashman: Perish the thought, Maya! Don't even say such a thing.

[LAUGHING]

Maya Kroth: But also, aside from just trends, the industrial revolution happened.

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Maya Kroth: So industrial agriculture comes in and American farmers can't really afford to put in all the time and effort to grow all those different varieties of celery with the white stalks and the yellow stalks. So, somebody along the way develops this, like, really hearty variety of celery. It's bright green. It's easy to grow. It's called Green Pascal and that, by and large, is what you see in super markets now. And this Green Pascal, you can grow it for cheap on a huge farm in California and then, because there's these new fangled refrigerated trucks that come around you can ship it anywhere in the United States. So, all of these farmers in places, like Kalamazoo, can't really compete with that. So pretty soon, there's tons of celery, everyone can afford it. It becomes very ordinary. And we go from having all of these different types of celery to having just one or two.

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Dan Pashman: So that’s how we went from jellied essence of celery to ants on a log. And now even celery covered with peanut butter and raisins feels old-fashioned. Can this once vaunted vegetable make a comeback? Coming up, Maya talks with the one guy who might be more into celery than she is. He’s developing a new variety that he calls the Elton John of celery.

CLIP (WILLIAM WOYES WEAVER): If I can get this to work the way I visualize it in my head, it’ll be a showstopper.

Dan Pashman: We’ll have that plus the latest in celery cocktails. Stick around.

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+++ BREAK +++

 

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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. And hey, before we get back to the show, I have two very exciting events I want to tell you about. In September, I am heading to London. It is the first ever international live Sporkful, all part of the London Podcast Festival. And my guest will be comedian Ed Gamble, of the co-hosts of the hugely popular Off Menu podcast. I asked everyone I know: Who should I have on as my guest? Who's the absolute first choice guest for this live show in London? And every person I asked was like, you should have the guy from Off Menu. So I'm extremely excited to have him on. You may also know him from Taskmaster and the Great Celebrity Bake Off. That show is September 14th in London. And also, there are just two spots left for my pasta tour of Italy! You heard me my way across Italy in our Anything's Pastable series, and you two can eat your way across Italy. And I'll meet up with you! We'll eat spaghetti all'assassina together in Bari. It's gonna be an incredible trip put together by the folks at Culinary Backstreets. Get tickets and info on both of these incredible events at sporkful.com/events. That's sporkful.com/events. Now I’m gonna turn things back over to reporter and celery obsessive Maya Kroth.

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Dan Pashman: When we left off in our story, celery had fallen from grace, from status symbol of the elite, to that thing that comes with buffalo wings. Here’s Maya.

Maya Kroth: So, if celery is gonna reclaim its rightful place in the vegetable kingdom, I think it needs a makeover. It needs something flashy and new. It needs a star. 

MUSIC 

CLIP (WILLIAM WOYES WEAVER): I don't want to sound like a food snob but the celery that we get in the stores — it's like one shoe fits all feet. 

Maya Kroth: This is William Woyes Weaver and he literally wrote the book on heirloom vegetable gardening. He's the curator emeritus of the Roughwood seed collection which is one of the largest private seed collections on the East Coast. 

William Woyes Weaver: I've probably eaten about 20 different varieties of celery and they're like apples. They're all different and they can be used in different ways in cooking. 

Maya Kroth: He told me that there used to be dozens of different varieties of celery. If you look in seed catalogs from the 1800s, there was white celery and yellow celery and red celery … 

William Woyes Weaver: I've had celery that's golden yellow. I've had celery that’s striped. And then there's the red stem celery from England. 

MUSIC

William Woyes Weaver: The French have a lot of weird celeries too: twisted stems and kinky curly leaves …

Maya Kroth: William has a lot of these seeds in the dusty storeroom in his 200-year-old house out in the country. It’s about a half hour outside of Philly and that is where he’s developing his own hybrid variety by crossing different heirloom celeries. So he found this 18th century celery that has a red stem, and then there's this other celery that's, like, more pink, and the leaves are variegated. I'll let him describe it.  

William Woyes Weaver: Oh, I was calling it the Elton John of celeries because, you know, he likes to wear garish glasses and things like that, and it really does pop. I want to get the pink stem pinker and the leaves more variegated so we end up with a really very attractive celery. 

Maya Kroth: William was very careful to stipulate that that's not the official name. I don't think he wants to get sued but I don't — I think he might be all right. But yeah, I have been waiting for this celery to come out — I don't know, it's been two years at least since I first heard about it. He says it's still five to six years off but I think he's hoping that by making heirloom celery interesting he can get people excited about it in the same way that we've gotten excited about, like, heirloom tomatoes, for example. 

MUSIC

William Woyes Weaver: We have chefs here in Philadelphia who are just waiting for us — that we have enough heirloom plants that we can share with them. We need to grow more in order for them to know what's there so they can play with it. That's what interested me and in tinkering with my colorful celery because I thought, well, if I can get this to work the way I visualize it in my head, it will be a show stopper and then we can work backwards from that and we can get some of the other celeries back on the table. But again, how are we going to serve them? I mean put them in glasses and put them on the table, the old Victorian way? I think for celery to survive into the next century, we're going to have to find new ways of preparing it. 

Maya Kroth: So the seed of celery's come back may already have been planted. And this is how food trends happen. It's not coming from the secret Cabal of food execs from that Portlandia sketch. It's just some guy tinkering away in a dusty workroom trying to make a better celery so chefs can push it on us. And it's not just chefs, it's bartenders too. Because there's actually a long history of celery in drinks, and I'm not just talking about bloody marys. 

Maya Kroth: Back when aristocrats were putting celery in vases, eastern European immigrants in New York were drinking tons of this celery tonic, called Dr. Brown’s Cel Ray Soda. If you haven't tried this before, it tastes kind of like a milder version of Sprite. Some people call it Jewish champagne. You can still find it in some delis in the city. And at one of the most famous ones, Russ & Daughters, they're making their own celery soda. And meanwhile, at a trendy new cocktail bar in New York, they're using celery in a way no Victorian could've ever predicted. 

Dave Arnold: Celery — you need celery. There's very few things on earth fresher than, like, the freshness of fresh celery. You know? For celery, it's just people don't care about it.

Maya Kroth: So that's Dave Arnold. And Dave may be even more of a celery geek than I am, if you'll believe it or not. 

Dave Arnold: I'm you know along with Don Lee, one of the managing partners of Existing Conditions on West 8th street in the West Village here in New York City.

Maya Kroth: He's using celery leaves in a new drink that he's devised at the bar. And I mean, they're using so many of these celery leaves. Chances are if you are a bunch of celery tops grown in New York state, you're gonna wind up in this drink. 

Dave Arnold: So we have a drink on our menu called the OG Celery. To me, gin and celery are good, good buddies — really good buddies. And when you add orange that’s like, you know, that’s Three Stooges, Three Amigos, Three’s Company — also had Mr. Furley. I haven’t thought about Three’s Company in a long time, it’s probably not good now that I think about it. We thought we were geniuses, that we were going to get this celery and that we were going to use just the leaves because, really, leaves are the best. Other — like the actual celery has too much water. It’s hard to work with. We're like, we're going to get the stuff that everyone throws away and we're going to use it. It's going to be awesome. But it turns out that nobody ships celery anymore to the market with the leaves on.

Maya Kroth: So these guys were searching high and low. How can they get their hands on celery tops? And finally, they found a local farmer who was willing to sell them all their celery tops and these things arrive at the bar on a weekly basis in containers about the size of a pizza box and they get about 16 of these pizza boxes full of celery tops delivered every week. And if you stack those, that's about the height of me. That's like a human sized stack of pizza boxes. 

[BAR AMBIANCE] 

Maya Kroth: But what happens next with these celery leaves is even more interesting. So as we're talking, Dave brings out this tank of liquid nitrogen. And he pours it into the cocktail shaker, along with the celery leaves and the parsley leaves. And just imagine this, it's like this bubbling dry ice fog, just like billowing out of this cocktail shaker. This is a technique that they call nitro-muddling.

Dave Arnold: Nitro-muddling is a technique that, I guess, I came up with which takes a kind of an old chef's technique of freezing herbs and liquid nitrogen and then pulverizing them to use, like, to make herb powders and stuff like that, but realizing that alcohol actually stops those herbs from kind of turning brown and tasting disgusting.

[NITRO-MUDDLING] 

Maya Kroth: Wow. 

Dave Arnold: The nitrogen's on, right?

[NITRO-MUDDLING CONTINUES]

Maya Kroth: Okay, so what he's doing, he's poured the liquid nitrogen into the cocktail shaker with the green leaves and he's muddling it, you know, with a standard cocktail muddler …

[MUDDLING]

Dave Arnold: So now I’m crushing up the herbs, very, very fine …

Maya Kroth: The leaves are turning into this like very, very, very fine bright green powder. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. It looks like something you'd put in your smoothie, like protein powder or something. And then he adds the gin ... 

Dave Arnold: Gin first, two ounces of Tanqueray. [POURING GIN] 

Maya Kroth: Yes …

Dave Arnold: This is orange syrup…. 

Maya Kroth: And this orange syrup that they make there in-house ..  

Dave Arnold: Four drops of salt. Remember to add salt to almost all of your cocktails ... 

Maya Kroth: A couple of drops of saline to give it a little bit of a savory to give it a little bit of a savory touch. 

Dave Arnold: I'm just gonna shake this like a demon. 

Maya Kroth: And then he shakes it. 

[DAVE SHAKING COCKTAIL]

Dave Arnold: You have to shake it for a while and also ... 

Maya Kroth: And he's explaining why this drink is one of the least favorite drinks for the bartenders to have to make. Bits of celery are going all over the place, and you know, when you’re staring at a packed bar on a Friday night, this is probably the last thing you want to be making. 

MUSIC

Maya Kroth: But let's get to the most important part: How does it taste? Well, it's hard to describe. It tastes sort of the way it looks. Green? I asked Dave to describe it.

Dave Arnold: Fresh fresh fresh. Punch punch punch. 

Dan Pashman: Fresh fresh fresh. Punch punch punch. Somehow, Maya, I feel like I actually know exactly what he means.

Maya Kroth: Right? 

Dan Pashman: And I feel like that's a lot of times what celery is doing. Like, with buffalo wings. Celery has been served with buffalo wings since the invention of buffalo wings. The Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, and they're meant to, like, be fresh and juicy and a little bit bitter and crisp. Like, they counteract the fat and the tang in the spice of the wings. 

Maya Kroth: Right. I feel like, you just feel healthier in, like, the proximity of celery, right?

Dan Pashman: Right. Right, exactly. [LAUGHS]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: So Maya, let's take stock here because it does seem like celery could be turning the corner. I am receiving word from Los Angeles that among the lemongrass shots set of Los Angeles, celery juice is all the rage.

Maya Kroth: Yeah, it's all over Instagram. People are, like, juicing ridiculous amounts of celery and drinking it every morning, right? [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: Do they like it?

Maya Kroth: I think they do. I mean, the health effects of celery juice are kind of dubious. It probably has a little bit more value as, like, for your Instagram than it does necessarily for the health of your body. [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] But hey, whatever gets people consuming more celery, as far as I'm concerned, right?

Dan Pashman: Right, right. It's funny because I feel like anytime a food is going to take on the status as the next trendy vegetable, you know, people partly like it cause they think it tastes good and partly because they feel good because they think it's healthy. But I feel like with celery, it's like, if it's too delicious, then it makes me suspicious about the health claims.

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] Right. And you know what? After all of this reporting, the thing that has changed with regard to, like, they way I view celery, I've tried all of these different funky, modern things that people are doing — from nitro-muddling, celery cocktails, celery juice, but, like, the thing that I really like now is just, you know, if I'm at a cocktail party or whatever, and there's a crudités platter, I go right for the celery now. Just, like, simple ... I don't even dip it in the ranch. Like, I just am savoring the very essence of what celery is, like, that crunch, that juiciness. There's something just — you don't have to do much to celery. Just kind of be in the moment with it and it's life changing.

Dan Pashman: Do your friends know about you and celery? Are they like, "Maya's coming. Put extra celery on the crudités platter."

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] At this point everybody knows about. I have friends who have bought celery vases because I just won't shut up about this.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS] How much is a nice celery vase going for these days?

Maya Kroth: You know, it's more affordable than you would think. You can get on ebay for, like, 20 bucks, I think.

Dan Pashman: Okay. And Maya, if all your dreams come true and celery becomes the next it vegetable and it's on all the menus and it's, you know, again, more expensive than caviar, are you sure you're gonna be happy?

Maya Kroth: I ... You know what? I think I'm probably gonna move on to broccoli or something [DAN PASHMAN LAUGHS] or whatever the next underrated vegetable is. I'm just always moving forward.

Dan Pashman: But are you the type to side with an underdog?

Maya Kroth: Definitely. I love an underdog.

Dan Pashman: Because I worry about you, Maya. I'm worried that if celery becomes really big, then you're gonna be, like, pfft, I liked celery better when no one else was eating it.

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS]

Dan Pashman: You're like, this band was way better before they got popular.

Maya Kroth: That would be very on brand for me.

Dan Pashman: Right. [LAUGHS]

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: All right, well we look forward to the next part of this story in a couple years in which you will report to us on celery had sold out. 

Maya Kroth: [LAUGHS] Deal. I'll be there. 

Dan Pashman: All right. [LAUGHS] All right. Thanks, Maya. Take care.

Maya Kroth: You, too.

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: A couple of updates since we first aired this episode a few years ago: First, the bar Existing Conditions, where they made that fancy celery cocktail, is now closed. And we checked back in with William Woys Weaver about the status of his Elton John celery. He said, sadly, they’ve lost that variety, and he’s, “not sure how to bring it back after all those years of hard work. All it takes is one summer drought to knock out seed stock for the future.” But he says he’s still working with other varieties, including an heirloom from the 1700s. He says his celeries are “very rare and underutilized but exploding with flavor.”

Dan Pashman: And I gotta say, since this episode came out, I feel like I'm seeing celery juice in more and more places and listening back to this kind of made me want to get a bottle. Bottoms up!

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: As I said, Maya’s story about celery was originally featured on the food podcast Proof from America’s Test Kitchen. Proof actually has this great mini-series going on right now, hosted by our friend Toni Tipton-Martin, called 100 Proof which is all about the modern cocktail renaissance. So check that out! And look, in general, if you like big deep dives on food history, science, and culture, which I’m guessing you do if you like The Sporkful, you’re gonna like Proof. So check it out wherever you get podcasts.

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