Celery's wild ancestor, Apium graveolens var. graveolens (commonly called smallage), grows across the Mediterranean basin, the British Isles, and into Central Asia, favouring damp, salty, and poorly drained soils near coastlines, river margins, and marshes. The plant in its wild form is intensely bitter, pungent, and aromatic: its leaves, stems, and seeds are all edible but harsh enough to limit consumption to medicinal and flavouring purposes rather than bulk eating. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew it well, calling it selinon and apium respectively, and valued it primarily as a medicinal plant for its diuretic, carminative, and tonic properties. The Greek city of Selinous in Sicily took its name from the wild plant that grew in abundance on the surrounding marshes. Systematic cultivation as a vegetable began only in 17th-century Italy, when Lombard gardeners developed the technique of earthing up the growing plant to exclude light from the stems, a process called blanching, which eliminated much of the bitterness and produced the mild, crisp, pale green stalks recognisable today. The celeriac variety, bred to develop a large, edible root rather than stalks, was developed in parallel in the same northern Italian growing region. The Lombard word seleri, origin of the French céleri and English celery, dates from this moment of horticultural innovation.
The improved blanched celery variety developed by Lombard gardeners spread northward through Italy to France within a generation of its development. French kitchen gardeners adopted it with enthusiasm, and by the early 18th century celery was being grown in the gardens of Versailles and in the kitchen gardens of the aristocracy. The vegetable crossed to England in the mid-18th century, established in English kitchen gardens by the time of Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845). North American settlers received celery from English and Dutch immigrants, but large-scale commercial production did not begin until the 1870s, when the Holland Marsh growing region of Ontario and the muck soils of Kalamazoo, Michigan proved ideally suited to its cultivation. American commercial growing transformed celery from a luxury kitchen garden plant into a widely affordable vegetable. Portuguese and Dutch trade networks carried European celery varieties to South America and Southeast Asia during the colonial period, while Chinese celery, an independently maintained, thinner-stalked, more intensely flavoured variety, continued its own separate cultivation tradition across East Asia without interruption from the European developments.
Celery holds a structural position in Western cooking disproportionate to its modest individual flavour. As one third of the French mirepoix (alongside onion and carrot) and one third of the Cajun and Creole Holy Trinity (alongside onion and green bell pepper), it underpins the flavour base of classical French cooking, Louisiana cooking, Italian soffritto, and by extension the entire range of soups, stews, braises, and stocks that define European and American culinary traditions. Celeriac, the root variety, occupies an equally important position in Northern European cooking, appearing in Polish rosół (chicken broth), céleri rémoulade (French mustard-dressed raw celeriac salad), and the Turkish zeytinyağlı tradition of cold olive oil dishes. The stalks are eaten raw as a low-calorie snack, and celery seed is a distinctive spice in American pickling brines, Old Bay seasoning, and celery salt. Celery's role as an aromatic foundation rather than a centrepiece ingredient means its contribution is almost always invisible in the finished dish: felt everywhere, credited nowhere.
Historical Journey of Celery
Greece — c. 600 BCE
Wild selinon (σέλινον) grows throughout the Greek world on marshes, riverbanks, and coastal ground: a pungent, bitter, aromatic member of the Apiaceae family that ancient Greek culture uses simultaneously for ceremony, medicine, and flavouring rather than as a primary food. The city of Selinous in Sicily takes its very name from this plant, which grows in such abundance on the surrounding marshes that the celery plant appears on its coins from the 6th century BCE. In mainland Greece, celery crowns woven from the dark green leaves of the wild plant are awarded alongside laurel wreaths to victors at the Nemean and Isthmian Games, establishing a ceremonial status inseparable from the plant's identity in the ancient world. Hippocrates and subsequent Greek physicians catalogue the plant's medicinal properties with precision: diuretic, tonic, carminative, useful in treating kidney and bladder conditions. In the kitchen the Greeks use it primarily in broth and as a flavouring in sauces rather than as a main vegetable, but its role in defining the aromatics of the ancient Mediterranean kitchen is foundational to everything that follows.
- Fakes soupa (Greek lentil soup with celery)
Rome, Italy — c. 100 CE
Roman cookery as codified in the late antique collection known as Apicius uses celery (apium) throughout: in the herb sauces served alongside boiled meats, in the spiced wines and honey drinks that accompany feasts, in the long-simmered broths of the Roman kitchen, and in the preservation of meats and fish. The Romans prize celery's bitter, assertive aromatic character as a counterpoint to the fat and richness of their meat-heavy cuisine. The green herb sauce tradition that flows from Roman apium preparations through medieval verde sauces to the Italian salsa verde of the present day is one of the longest continuous culinary traditions in the Western world. Pliny the Elder documents celery cultivation across the empire in his Naturalis Historia, noting both wild and cultivated forms and their different medicinal applications. Roman legions, carrying with them the agricultural knowledge of Italy, plant and harvest celery across Gaul, Britain, and North Africa, establishing its presence throughout the territories that would become medieval Europe.
- Roman Apician celery sauce
China — c. 900 CE
Chinese celery (芹菜, qīncài) is an independently maintained, distinct variety of Apium graveolens: thinner-stalked than the European cultivated form, more intensely flavoured, and darker green, its assertive aromatics closer to the wild plant than to the mild, blanched Italian celery developed in the 17th century. It is well established in Chinese cooking by the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), appearing in the agricultural texts that document the crops of the northern Chinese plains and the Yangtze basin. In the Chinese kitchen, celery is treated as a primary vegetable rather than merely an aromatic: stir-fried at high heat with pork or beef, preserving its crisp texture while limiting the intensity of its flavour; used raw and shredded in cold-dressed preparations with sesame oil and vinegar; and incorporated into the dumpling fillings of northern Chinese cuisine, where its water content and sharp fragrance cut through fatty meat. The dish of celery and lily bulb (qīncài bǎihé) is a classic Cantonese pairing of textures and aromatic delicacy, demonstrating the Chinese kitchen's use of the vegetable in its own right rather than as a background flavouring.
- Chinese celery and dried tofu stir-fry
Egypt — c. 1200 CE
Medieval Arabic culinary literature, particularly the cookbooks compiled in Cairo and Aleppo between the 9th and 13th centuries CE, documents celery (karrafs, كرفس) as a significant flavouring in the braised meat preparations of the Arab kitchen. The combination of celery braised long and slow with lamb, onion, and a warming spice mixture of cumin, coriander, and cinnamon produces lahm bi karrafs, one of the most enduring dishes in Arab cooking: a preparation whose flavour logic (the aromatic bitterness of celery against the richness of slow-braised lamb) is sound enough to have survived unchanged across a thousand years of continuous preparation. It appears in the 13th-century Baghdadi cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh (Book of Dishes) as well as in Levantine and Egyptian manuscripts, confirming its pan-Arab rather than merely regional status. Cairo receives celery through the Mediterranean trade networks of the Fatimid and Mamluk periods, when the city was one of the great cosmopolitan centres of the world and its markets held aromatics from across the Islamic world.
- Lahm bi karrafs (Arab braised lamb with celery)
Turkey — c. 1400 CE
Ottoman cuisine develops the celeriac variety of celery (kereviz, Apium graveolens var. rapaceum) into one of its most characteristic cold vegetable preparations. Celeriac, bred for a large, edible root bulb rather than stalks, is slow-braised in quarters with olive oil, lemon juice, sugar, and a little water until completely tender and glossy: a preparation that defines the class of cold olive oil dishes (zeytinyağlı) fundamental to Turkish mezze culture. The logic of zeytinyağlı is precise: long, slow, covered braising in olive oil and liquid allows the vegetable to absorb the fat as it cooks, becoming simultaneously yielding and intensely flavoured. The dish is served at room temperature rather than hot, as the olive oil congeals slightly when cold and coats the vegetable in a way that amplifies its flavour. Kereviz zeytinyağlı remains one of the most prized entries in the Turkish mezze tradition, its clean, lemony freshness providing counterpoint to the richer preparations on the table and exemplifying the Ottoman cold vegetable principle.
- Kereviz zeytinyağlı (Turkish braised celeriac with olive oil)
Italy — c. 1620 CE
Italian gardeners in Lombardy develop in the 17th century the cultivation technique that transforms wild celery from a harsh, medicinal herb into a mild table vegetable: blanching, the practice of earthing up or wrapping the growing plant to exclude light from the stems during the final weeks before harvest. Without light, the stems cannot manufacture chlorophyll; the bitterness that concentrated in the green, sun-exposed tissue diminishes dramatically, and the result is the mild, crisp, pale celery of the modern kitchen. This innovation is among the most consequential developments in European vegetable cookery of the early modern period. The Lombard word seleri, origin of the French céleri and English celery, dates from this period of innovation. Italian kitchen culture incorporates blanched celery immediately into soffritto (the sautéed aromatic base of onion, carrot, and celery in olive oil that begins nearly every Italian braise, ragù, and soup), into the antipasto table as a raw vegetable, and into the braised preparations of the Lombard kitchen alongside roasted meats and rich braised dishes.
- Sedano al parmigiano (Italian celery and parmesan salad)
- Sedano al pomodoro (Italian braised celery in tomato)
France — c. 1700 CE
The improved Italian celery variety reaches France in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, adopted by French kitchen gardeners who recognise its quality and begin growing it for the tables of the aristocracy and the emerging professional bourgeoisie. In French professional cooking, celery becomes the third member of the mirepoix alongside onion and carrot: the aromatic base over which French stocks, sauces, and braises are built. The name mirepoix commemorates the 18th-century Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, in whose household kitchen the combination was formalised as a standard preparation. Celery enters pot-au-feu, the foundational boiled beef and vegetable dish of French domestic cooking, as one of the aromatics left whole in the broth. Celeriac finds its most iconic French expression in céleri rémoulade: raw celeriac cut into fine julienne or grated, dressed with a sharp mustard mayonnaise, and served as a starter at the brasserie table, where it has appeared essentially unchanged since the late 19th century. The mirepoix tradition that France codifies here is borrowed from the Italian soffritto and refined into the universal foundation of classical French cooking.
- Pot-au-feu (French boiled beef and vegetables)
- Céleri rémoulade (French celeriac in mustard dressing)
England — c. 1750 CE
Celery arrives in England from France during the 18th century, carried first into the fashionable households of the aristocracy and the gentry who followed French culinary practice, and established in the English kitchen garden by the Georgian period. Eliza Acton, whose Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) is one of the foundational texts of English domestic cookery, includes celery in cream soups, in braises alongside roast meats, and as a salad ingredient. The English develop two celery preparations that remain distinctively British in character: cream of celery soup, in which the vegetable is slowly cooked in stock with onion and finished with cream to produce a silky, mildly aromatic soup; and braised celery alongside roasts, in which whole celery hearts are poached in stock and butter until completely tender, a preparation standard in the Victorian and Edwardian kitchen alongside a Sunday joint. The Waldorf salad, created in New York but immediately popularised in English hotel dining rooms, reinforces celery's identity as a fresh, crunchy raw ingredient in both the American and British culinary imaginations.
- Cream of celery soup
- English braised celery with cream sauce
Poland — c. 1800 CE
In Polish cooking, celeriac (seler korzeniowy) holds a position of quiet but absolute structural importance as one of the four essential aromatics of rosół, the golden chicken broth that is the cornerstone of Polish Sunday cooking and celebration meals. Rosół is assembled from a whole chicken or a mixture of chicken and beef bones, simmered for several hours with parsley root, carrot, leek, and a quarter of celeriac bulb; the broth is then strained to a clear, amber clarity and served with thin egg noodles. The depth of flavour in a well-made rosół depends on all four aromatics in balance, but it is the celeriac, with its earthy, slightly sweet, deeply savoury character, that gives the broth its distinctive warmth. Polish cooks distinguish carefully between celery stalks (naciowy seler) and celeriac root (korzeniowy seler), and it is the root that appears in virtually every traditional Polish broth, not the stalks, which are used primarily as garnish. Celeriac is also found in the Polish Christmas Eve beet soup (barszcz wigilijny), in the żurek sour rye soup, and in the cold cuts of the Polish Easter table.
- Rosół (Polish golden broth with celeriac)
Louisiana, United States — c. 1820 CE
Celery becomes the third element of what Cajun and Creole cooks call the Holy Trinity: the aromatic base of diced onion, celery, and green bell pepper over which virtually every Louisiana dish begins. The Holy Trinity is the culinary signature of Louisiana cooking as completely as the mirepoix is the signature of French cooking: neither gumbo, nor jambalaya, nor étouffée, nor the red beans and rice of the New Orleans Monday tradition can begin without it. The characterisation as a 'trinity' carries the weight of something sacred: the three aromatics are treated not as optional flavourings but as the mandatory first act of the cooking process, fried together in fat until softened and fragrant, a step that cannot be abbreviated without undermining the dish. The celery used in Louisiana cooking contributes primarily its aromatic crunch and slight bitterness to the base; it softens and loses its texture through cooking, but its flavour penetrates everything that cooks over it. The Holy Trinity is the most American reinvention of the French mirepoix tradition, replacing the carrot with the green bell pepper that the local climate produces abundantly and that the Creole palate preferred.
- Cajun chicken and sausage gumbo
- Cajun jambalaya
Japan — c. 1870 CE
Celery (セロリ, serori) arrives in Japan during the Meiji period (1868-1912) through the open trading ports of Yokohama and Kobe, part of a wide programme of Western vegetable introduction that accompanied Japan's rapid modernisation and engagement with European food culture. The Japanese kitchen approaches celery initially with some caution: its strong aromatics and unfamiliar bitterness made it difficult to integrate into the delicate flavour profiles of traditional Japanese cooking. The solution found by home cooks was asazuke (quick-pickling): celery stalks are cut into pieces and packed with salt, sometimes with sesame oil, and occasionally with kombu (dried kelp), left for an hour or overnight, and served as a crisp, lightly fermented accompaniment to rice. This preparation manages celery's intensity by partial transformation through salt and the mild acidity of lactic fermentation, softening its character while preserving its crunch. Celery also enters the Japanese yoshoku repertoire (Western-influenced home cooking) through the braised stews and cream soups adopted from European models during the Meiji modernisation, and appears in the benihana-style stir-fries that became part of Japanese family cooking in the 20th century.
- Celery asazuke (Japanese lightly pickled celery)
New York, United States — c. 1893 CE
The Waldorf salad is created in 1893 at the newly opened Waldorf Hotel in New York by Oscar Tschirky, the hotel's maître d'hôtel, in a preparation of raw celery, apple, and mayonnaise that becomes almost immediately one of the most famous restaurant dishes in American culinary history. The dish achieves its rapid fame through a combination of simplicity, novelty, and the social cachet of the Waldorf, then the most fashionable hotel in the city. Walnuts were added in a later version, and it is this three-element combination of celery, apple, and walnut in mayonnaise that became standardised in American cookbooks and hotel menus by the early 20th century. The salad's significance for celery's identity is considerable: it establishes celery as a raw ingredient of fresh, crunchy character in the American culinary imagination, a role that extends through 20th-century American cooking to the celery stalks that accompany Buffalo wings, the celery in Bloody Mary cocktails, and the raw celery served as a crudité alongside dips at every American party table. The Waldorf tradition also travels back to England, where it becomes a fixture of hotel dining room menus throughout the Edwardian period and beyond.
Brazil — c. 1920 CE
Celery arrives in Brazil with Portuguese and Italian immigrant communities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, absorbed into a national cuisine that was itself a layered synthesis of Portuguese colonial cooking, African foodways brought by enslaved peoples, and indigenous Amazonian ingredients. The Italian community of São Paulo's Bela Vista neighbourhood carries with them the soffritto tradition: onion, carrot, and celery sautéed in olive oil as the foundation of Italian-Brazilian pasta sauces and braises. Celery also enters cozido brasileiro, the lavish boiled meat and vegetable feast that is Brazil's most elaborate domestic festive dish: a descendant of the Portuguese cozido and the Spanish cocido, enriched by the range of Brazilian tubers (cassava, taro, and sweet potato) and meats, in which celery is simmered in the broth alongside cabbage, carrot, and chorizo to build the flavour base. The Brazilian cozido tradition treats celery as an essential aromatic for the broth rather than as a vegetable to be served at table, reflecting the ingredient's consistent function across European cooking traditions as the invisible foundation of flavour rather than the visible star of the dish.
- Cozido brasileiro (Brazilian hearty boiled stew)
