While people who dislike celery tend to have strong feelings about it, the rest of us find it hard to believe such an innocuous vegetable could even inspire opinion, much less divide it. A couple of chopped celery stalks can almost always add something to a dish, even if its subtlety means it sometimes goes unnoticed.
In fact, celery’s versatility presents a problem: we buy it because it’s so useful, but we often forget to include it because it tends to be optional. Instead, we leave it to go bendy in the fridge until it’s time to buy more (although you can quickly revive limp celery by standing the cut stalks in cold water, like flowers in a vase).
Even for people who don’t like it, celery remains a standard component of most soup stocks – and it’s one of the three main ingredients, along with carrot and onion, of the classic culinary base known as a mirepoix in France and a sofrito in Italy. But cooked or raw, celery can also stand as a main ingredient in its own right. Here are 17 ways to put celery centre stage.
First up, salads, beginning with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s delicious – if mildly startling – combination of celery, orange and mackerel. The mackerel can be smoked, but fresh fillets, quickly pan-fried while you macerate the orange and celery in orange juice and a little olive oil, are probably preferable. Yotam Ottolenghi’s celery salad with feta and soft-boiled egg also includes onion and sliced green pepper, a formula that he recommends as, if not a hangover cure, at least a comforting hangover accompaniment.
The classic Waldorf salad has a poor – and quite possibly deserved – reputation. In its original 1893 incarnation, it was just celery, sliced apples and mayonnaise, which is nobody’s idea of a good time. Thankfully, Felicity Cloake doesn’t insist on historical accuracy: her optimised version includes walnuts, sultanas and lettuce. Her apples are tart and green and the mayo is lightened with creme fraiche and spiced with mustard. The result sounds like something to be enjoyed, rather than endured. For a variation on presentation, you could deploy the same flavours in a Waldorf slaw.
Meera Sodha’s vegan puy lentil, celery and herb salad may seem like an elaborate lunch, but with precooked lentils and pre-pickled onions it can be thrown together in about a quarter of an hour.
Supermarket celery often comes trimmed and bagged, but if you have a full head from a greengrocer, you may wonder what to do with the leaves (even a trimmed head has pale leaves at its core). You can use them as a parsley stand-in (the two plants are closely related) or put them to use in a salad of their own.
Tom Hunt offers two ways to use up celery leaves. The first is a straightforward celery leaf salad with a walnut dressing; the second is a winter tabbouleh, a very simple recipe, but one that may require some extra shopping, as it calls for maftoul – giant couscous – sumac, leek tops and jarred roast peppers.
Soup is a traditional way to deal with surplus celery, but Nigel Slater’s celery soup with toasted cheese is an elegant twist on a normally humble offering. Roasted celery and shallots are blitzed into a coarse soup with half a litre of stock, then topped with thick slices of toast, which in turn are topped with goat’s cheese, melted under the grill. Rachel Roddy’s winter minestrone is a good example of celery playing a more ensemble role, alongside pumpkin, white beans and cavolo nero.
Ottolenghi’s Swiss chard and celery gratin is one of the more forgiving recipes I have tried; I would go so far as to suggest you could make this with celery alone or, under different circumstances, only chard. The celery is cooked first, in milk; the chard second, in water. The two are then combined in a sauce that comes together with butter, a bit of flour and some of the reserved celery milk. After that, you dump the whole mess into a baking dish and top with a mix of breadcrumbs, parsley, parmesan and grated lemon zest. Stick in the oven for half an hour, more or less – until it turns an appealing golden colour. Either side of perfect, it will still be very good.
This more substantial chicken and celery stew, also from Ottolenghi, has the advantage that it can be made in advance, only requiring a few minutes under the grill before serving. Delia Smith bakes a single head of celery with pancetta and shallots, although it’s actually steamed in a parcel of greaseproof paper in the oven. Meera Sodha’s celery congee is a savoury rice porridge, again using a whole head of celery, along with braised shiitake mushrooms.
Celery juice had a moment as a cure-all wellness drink in 2019 (echoing a 19th-century fad for celery tonic). That moment has passed, but you can still make your own celery juice with a food processor, a few spoonfuls of maple syrup for sweetness and possibly some chilli for heat.
You can also use celery juice to make yourself a fresh, faintly grassy sorbet, one of a few unlikely celery desserts, including celery cake. In this recipe, the celery has the same, essentially structural role that carrots play in carrot cake.
And finally, once the hard work is done, a cocktail. Most celery cocktails are just standard drinks enhanced with celery bitters, but the primavera (from João Chitas at Sopwell House) is an appletini mutation that uses a homemade celery syrup you can create by boiling up celery, sugar and water. It may not be a cure-all, but it can’t do any harm.
