Weird celery recipes
A rabbit trail about rabbit food (rabbits eat celery, right?)
When I was writing the post on braised celery, I noticed a recipe for a weird celery casserole in the San Angelo Junior League cookbook, and had to stop myself from digging through all my other cookbooks in search of other weird celery recipes. I finally got around to it.
First, though, a note on what I mean by “weird.” Our experiences with food, our tastes and preferences, are shaped by our cultures—national, regional, local, familial—but also globalization, media, industrial food production, geography, our foodscapes, history, and pop culture, among other things. Our relationship to food is, as I would have said in grad school, overdetermined. It’s also deeply idiosyncratic, with as many variations on a given theme as there are cooks to improvise. So when I call something “weird,” what I mean is that’s outside my experience or mental framework for thinking about what’s possible. And hopefully, encountering weird stuff will help me expand that framework.
It’s not my intention to mock or belittle these recipes, and when I encounter one that makes me say what the hell even is this—like a dish involving lemon jello and corned beef that I absolutely plan to cook—I hope to actually think about why someone would find comfort or joy (or maybe just convenience) in that particular food.
So, the weird celery recipes.
Mostly, it’s a lot of casseroles. A lot of the same casserole, actually, more or less. In the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book (1953), there’s a recipe for a “Celery Luncheon Bake”: 4 cups celery in 1-inch pieces, 1 can condensed cream of chicken soup, and 1 1/2 cups shredded processed cheese, arranged in alternating layers (in individual casseroles, for extra fanciness) and topped with slivered almonds before baking. Minus the cheese, that’s basically the foundation of all the other versions I found—several of which, bizzarely, are called “Far East Celery” (and searching the web for that term pulls up a lot of recipes, so it’s still around). It’s probably the inclusion of water chestnuts, which strikes me as a really tenuous link, but another recipe from the BHG cookbook might also be a factor: the Neiman Marcus Celery Oriental (putting the adjective after the noun is how the French do it, so, again, extra fanciness). The recipe itself doesn’t really connect to the casseroles (it’s a salad of lightly boiled celery and lightly sautéed sliced mushrooms, tossed lightly with almond halves), but it does link celery with Asia, so idk.1 Another tenuous link.
At any rate, the celery casserole recipes I have on hand call for mixing celery with cream of chicken (or celery, or mushroom) soup, sliced water chestnuts, and diced pimentos, and topping it all with something crunchy—almonds are common, but they’re often combined with bread crumbs or croutons or canned fried onion rings or something similar. And they show up in kind of a range of places: the Na Leo Lani 25th Anniversary Cookbook (they’re a choir from Hawai’i); Cooking in Wyoming (the 1969 “women’s suffrage centennial edition,” which includes two versions); the Typically Texas Cookbook (“recipes used by rural electric co-op members”); a cookbook put together by our local Episcopal church in the late 1970s; and the San Angelo Junior League’s cookbook.
There are also fussier versions of celery casserole in the Dallas Junior League cookbook (which includes not one, but three, variations), Under The Mushroom (recipes from Dallas restaurant The Little Mushroom, which apparently got its initial funding from the Trammell Crows?), and the New Holiday Cookbook: Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers. That last one requires cooks to make a cream sauce from scratch, and also includes cheddar cheese and mushrooms, which honestly doesn’t sound too bad?
I did find a few things a bit weirder than casseroles, thankfully. Cooking in Wyoming has a recipe for a celery-apple salad, which is chopped celery, apple, and walnuts—along with cinnamon candies—in cherry jell-o (but I’m sure you could substitute a different flavor). The BHG cookbook includes “Celery Victor,” which apparently is named for the guy who invented it in 1910. It’s celery cooked in broth or consommé and then chilled in a vinaigrette marinade; this version calls for topping the dish with anchovy filets.
A similar recipe appears in the 1960 Ladies Home Journal Cookbook (not one of mine—in the library at work) under the name “Celery Palermo.” There’s also a recipe for fresh celery stalks topped with a Worchestershire-&-mayo-based sauce and canned sardines. Better than that, there’s a recipe for FRIED CELERY. Why would you fry a celery? I don’t know. But somebody might ask why you’d fry a pickle, and that’s delicious, so I’m probably going to fry a celery at some point.
I also looked in a couple of the professional cookbooks2 on my shelf that seemed likely to have interesting celery recipes. Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone (1997) has basic recipes for braised and gratinéed celery—like Marcella Hazan’s, but simpler. There’s also one for a celery root and potato puree, which sounds good, though celeriac isn’t common in our local grocey stores. A few salads, as well: celery, apple, and Gruyère (no gelatin), and kohlrabi and celery with a mustard vinaigrette. Nothing too bonkers, but all things that might get made and eaten in our house.
José Andrés’ Vegetables Unleashed, which is solid overall, only has two celery recipes—though, to be fair, they both sound pretty tasty. There’s a deconstructed Waldorf salad, which is basically celery stalks with blue cheese and nuts (but fancier and more involved). And then celeriac is one of the suggestions for vegetable “steaks,” along with rutabagas, cauliflower, cabbage, and portobellos—I’ve heard of grilling slabs of the last three, but not celery root or rutabagas. Summer plans!
If any of y’all have any weird celery recipes in your collections, let me know!
Celery appears to have originated in, or maybe just first been cultivated in, the regions around the Mediterranean—Greece, Egypt, &c. It’s grown in Asia, but more for the leaves than the stalks.
I recognize that both the Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies Home Journal cookbooks are professional, but they were also—especially in the 1950s and ‘60s—aimed at the women who then contributed to the amateur cookbooks I’ve grouped them with.
Very interesting post! I myself tend to enjoy celery stalks with peanut butter or a good pimiento cheese and am happy 🥰