by Rebecca Rupp
In the Middle Ages, celery was used as a laxative or diuretic, as a treatment for gallstones, and as a palliative for wild animal bites. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was recommended (in tea) for digestive upsets and insomnia, and (in conserve) for chest pains. The nineteenth edition of the Dispensatory of the United States of America (1907) listed a “Compound Elixir of Celery,” recommended for its sleep-inducing and calmative properties, though this may have had less to do with celery than with the elixir’s other ingredients, which included alcohol and cocaine. Madame de Pompadour, with celery’s rumored aphrodisiac effect in mind, fed Louis XV on celery soup, and legendary eighteenth-century lover Giacomo Casanova is said to have eaten celery to improve his sexual stamina.
Some modern research indicates that Casanova, at least, may have had it right. Doctors Mark Anderson, Walter Gaman, and Judith Gaman, coauthors of Stay Young: Ten Proven Steps to Ultimate Health (2010), have dubbed celery “Vegetable Viagra.” The secret, they explain, is androsterone, a naturally occurring steroid found in human sweat and urine, boar saliva, and celery. In people and boars, androsterone acts as a pheromone, which makes the males exuding it more attractive to females. A few stalks of celery before a date, the authors of Stay Young suggest, may be the difference between a cold shoulder and a hot night.
For all its aphrodisiacal potential, celery has some dismal associations. The ancient Greeks associated it with death, trimmed tombs with it, and coined the ominous saying “He now has need of nothing but celery” to mean imminent demise. Seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick, better known for such sensual and upbeat works as “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), wrote a gloomy celery-featuring ditty titled “To Perenna, A Mistress” that begins, “Dear Perenna, prithee come / And with smallage dress my tomb.” Wild celery was found among the funeral garlands in King Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus.
The innocent-seeming celery does indeed have distinctly ominous features. Prominent among these is its content of chemical compounds known as psoralens or furocoumarins. Psoralens, present in appreciable amounts in celery, parsnips, and parsley, are potent photosensitizers — that is, they increase the sensitivity of the skin to sunlight. In combination with ultra-violet irradiation, psoralens have been used therapeutically to treat vitiligo — a skin depigmentation condition — and psoriasis, a chronic and miserable inflammatory skin disease. (Psoralen shares a root with the Greek psoraleos, “mangy,” and psora, “itch.”) The drawback is that such treatments must be strictly limited, since psoralens are also photocarcinogens, with the potential for causing skin cancers.
In healthy celery, psoralens are present at relatively low levels and pose no threat to the human hide. Sick celery, however, is a different matter. The plant produces psoralens in response to microbial invasion; thus diseased plants possess ten to one hundred times more of these molecules than their germ-free relatives, potentially dangerous concentrations. And then there are parsnips (Pastinaca sativa), which, even in the pink of health, are comparatively swimming in psoralens. Consumption of 0.1 kg of parsnip (a mere 3½ ounces) necessarily involves ingesting 4 to 5 mg of assorted psoralens, a potentially risky quantity unless one lives in a lightless cellar. The chief psoralens in celery, bergapten and xanthotoxin, are capable, even at normal, low levels, of inducing severe allergic reactions, frequently afflicting celery harvesters and growers and ranging in severity from hives to outright anaphylactic shock.
Similarly implicated in celery allergies is apiol, the essential aromatic oil of the celery plant, most highly concentrated in the spicy seeds. Apiol’s major constituent is a terpene compound called limonene, also present in citrus fruits and various mints. (Limonene, the bête noire of the fruit juice industry, turns bitter in processing, and has therefore inspired a scientific and industrial scramble to develop low-limonene oranges and grapefruits.) The allergic reaction is said to be exacerbated by exercise, a good argument for lying quietly on the couch while chewing celery stalks. Apiol, since the days of Hippocrates, has also been known to induce abortion, and was used as an effective, but frighteningly toxic, abortifacient into the mid-twentieth century.
In the culinary sense, apiol is a much more desirable proposition, giving celery and parsley their distinctive flavor. In the celery plant, it is concentrated in the seeds and in cavities between the cells of the leaves, which is why leafy celery tops are often used to flavor soups. The Romans loved it, and used celery seeds (preferably the wild, stronger-flavored variety) as a condiment. The author of Apicius sprinkled them liberally in a sauce to be served with wild boar.
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Snow White Celery
The practice of blanching celery began in France in the reign of Louis XIV, under the direction of Jean de la Quintinie in the Sun King’s kitchen garden at Versailles. Sweeter, tenderer, and snow white, as opposed to the green sun-soaked norm, blanched celery quickly became the dietary standard. The earliest blanching techniques, also applied to rhubarb and endive, involved “earthing up,” or piling soil around the growing stalks. Later growers employed earthenware blanchers, large bell-jar-shaped pots with removable lids.
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With the decline and fall of Rome, celery fell from public view. It was resurrected as an edible, according to food historians, only in the sixteenth century, and then by way of Italy, where the hefty wide-stalked varieties similar to those around today were originally developed. The Reverend William Turner chattily mentions Italian celery in his Herbal of 1538: “The first I ever saw was in the Venetian Ambassador’s garden in the spittle yard, near Bishop’s Gate Streete.” (Spittle, less repulsive than it sounds, was an early English term for garden spade.) John Parkinson was not enthusiastic about it — “its evil taste and savour doth cause it not to be accepted in meates as Parsley.”
By Parkinson’s time, however, the culinarily adept French were in the midst of developing an elaborate celery cuisine. A recipe of 1659 describes a dish of celery cooked with lemon, pomegranates, and beets. Celery hearts — the fused base where the stalks meet — were esteemed; and the leafy stalks themselves were eaten as delicacies with dressings of oil and pepper.
By 1699, British diarist and prolific writer John Evelyn had adopted the cause of “Sellery.” In his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, he praises the “high and grateful Taste” of celery, peeled, sliced, and eaten with “Oyl, Vinegar, Salt and Peper” (though he warns diners that small red worms often lurk in the stalks). Evelyn was an early proponent of the “Herby-Diet” — that is, vegetarianism.
Acetaria, a spin-off from a far more ambitious work, was originally intended as a mere chapter in Evelyn’s three-volume, one-thousand-plus-page Elysium Britannicum, or The Royal Garden, a comprehensive account of the practices and principles of seventeenth-century gardening. The book as planned was to include detailed chapters on soils and composts, waterworks, nurseries, and bowling greens, orangeries and aviaries, garden statuary, a plan for revamping cemeteries, and a horticultural book list.
Though Evelyn worked on the project for 50 years, it was never published, and after his death Christ Church Library, Oxford, acquired the manuscript — an intimidating mishmash of text; loose notes; pasted-in addenda; DIY instructions for constructing a “Transparent Bee-Hive,” a garden “Thermoscope or wheather-Glass,” and an artificial echo; and original sketches, among them a nice diagram of a tarantula. In the year 2000, Evelyn’s magnum opus — or at least the surviving third of it — finally appeared in print, painstakingly deciphered and transcribed by John Ingram of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, some 300 years after the publication of Acetaria — originally slated to appear in Book II, Chapter XX, as “Of Sallets.”
By 1699, British diarist John Evelyn had adopted the cause of “Sellery,” which he praised for its “high and grateful Taste.”
Cultivated celery, Apius graveolens var. dulce, eaten today for its crunchy stalks, is certainly the vegetable recommended by Evelyn for his
Sellery salad. Botanically speaking, the scrumptious stalks are leaf petioles rather than true stems — structural equivalents of the “stems” that attach conventional leaves to the branch of a tree. The other cultivated celery, A. graveolens var. rapaceum, also known as knob- or turnip-rooted celery or celeriac, features a starch-swollen lower stem (not root). The scientific name rapaceum reflects the necessary harvesting technique — unlike the more docile garden celery, celeriac clings to Mother Earth and has to be ripped from the ground by force.
Historically, it caught on best in Germany and France, where it was usually served up boiled. Stephen Switzer, an eighteenth-century English gardener and garden writer, obtained celeriac from an importer of “curious seeds,” who in turn had procured it from Alexandria. Switzer grew some, and included it in his 1729 treatise titled “A compendious method for the raising of Italian broccoli, Spanish cardoon, celeriac, finochi and other foreign vegetables,” which suggests that it was at that time a vegetable oddity.
The European colonists brought celery with them to America, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, since the climate, north or south, never seemed to suit it. The gardeners of Massachusetts Bay reported that their “Celary” roots rotted over the winter, and Thomas Jefferson recorded similarly unhappy results at Monticello. Somebody eventually managed to grow it, however: talented Philadelphia horticulturalist and seedsman Bernard M’Mahon (or McMahon) — to whom Jefferson initially entrusted the plant collections of the Lewis and Clark expedition — lists four varieties common to American gardens in 1806, though it certainly never reached such heights of commonness as the bean, the pea, and the onion.
Commercial celery didn’t appear until the mid-nineteenth century, the successful stock imported from Scotland to Kalamazoo, Michigan (now “Celery City”) by an enterprising Scotsman named George Taylor in 1856. (Anti-Taylor sources claim the crucial seed arrived with a green-thumbed Dutch immigrant in the 1870s.)
Burpee’s 1888 catalog offered ten varieties of celery, including the Incomparable Crimson and the White Walnut, so named for its rich, nutty flavor, plus celeriac or turnip-rooted celery which, Mr. Burpee adds truthfully, in parentheses, is really shaped like an apple. Until the 1930s most celery in this country was sold blanched and white, but the most likely denizen of the supermarket vegetable bins today is a variety called Pascal, which is green.
As a food source, celery is so pathetic that diet dogma holds that it has “negative calories” — that is, it takes more energy to chew and digest it than it provides in the first place.
Celery is still characteristically eaten crisply raw, much as advised by the omniscient Ladies’ Home Journal in 1891, which directed:
“Celery should be scraped and washed and then put in iced water, to be made crisp, at least an hour before it goes on the table. It is now served in long, flat glass dishes. It should be put on the table with the meat and other vegetables, and is to be removed before the dessert is served.”
In crisply raw form, there’s not much to it. Celery is 95 percent water, and the average stalk delivers just 10 dietary calories. As a food source, celery is so pathetic that diet dogma holds that it has “negative calories” — that is, it takes more energy to chew and digest it than it provides in the first place. Sadly, this isn’t actually true. Neither is the equally hopeful theory of Leonard J. Kelly of New York City, who hypothesized that very cold beer has negative calories, due to the energy expenditure exerted by the beer-drinking body in warming it up.
Celery also tends to be finicky to grow, though if you’ve got the right combination of temperature and soil, you can get a lot of bang for your buck: a single ounce of celery seed is enough to plant a full acre of celery. Failing that, the possibilities are even more exciting. Medieval magicians, the story goes, tucked celery seeds in their shoes in order to fly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Which
CORN CREATES
VAMPIRES
plus
Pilfering Pilgrims,
A Peculiar Baby’s Rattle,
George Washington’s Whiskey,
Major Lynde’s Ignominious
Defeat, Pudding with
Grasshoppers, and A Test
in Table Manners
Gardens, scholars say, are the first signs of commitment to a community. When people plant corn they are saying, let’s stay here.
ANNE RAVER
The number one crop in traditionally corny Kansas, home of Dorothy, Toto, and Dwight David Eisenhower, is wheat. Number two is sorghum, and corn limps in at third place, just ahead of soybeans. Still, Kansas is part of the Corn Belt, the band of corn-rich cropland that has been steadily oozing westward since colonial days. The original American Corn Belt extended down the Atlantic Coastal Plain from Massachusetts to Georgia. It then shifted into the Piedmont, then later hopped the Appalachians and spread across Kentucky and Tennessee. Tennessee raised most of the nation’s corn well into the nineteenth century, when the Belt moved again, to the territory it occupies today: fifty million acres stretching from Ohio to South Dakota and Kansas. Today the top state for American corn is Iowa.
From the Corn Belt comes most of this country’s annual ten-billion-plus bushels of corn, which is enough, says one mathematically minded urbanite, to bury all of Manhattan Island sixteen feet deep in kernels. (This is a creepy image, especially if you’ve seen that bit in the 1985 movie Witness, where an evil policeman is asphyxiated in a silo under tons of corn.) About 50 percent of American corn is used as livestock feed.
Another 15 percent or so is exported, and about 25 percent is used to make ethanol.
Of the remaining 10 percent, less than 1 percent is eaten as just plain corn, by people — the rest, in more or less adulterated forms, passes into an enormous number of peripheral corn products. Among these are corn syrup, cornstarch, corn oil, and cornmeal, the last once recommended (rapidly eaten in quantity) to prevent internal damage due to inadvertently swallowed fishbones. More versatile medicinally was corn whiskey, once used to treat colds, coughs, consumption, toothache, rheumatism, and arthritis — all ailments that must have been rampant, since American whiskey consumption in the period from 1790 to 1840 has been estimated at an annual five gallons a head.
Today processed corn in various forms figures in cardboard, charcoal briquettes, crayons, fireworks, wallpaper, aspirin, chewing gum, pancake mix, shoe polish, ketchup, marshmallows, instant tea, mayonnaise, surgical dressings, cat litter, golf tees, and soap. The cobs make a dandy fuel for smoking hams and, carved, form the bowls of corncob pipes — a craft that went commercial in 1869 in Missouri. Cobs have also functioned as bottle stoppers, tool handles, hair curlers, fishing floats, and — sliced crosswise — as checkers; and creative housewives in nineteenth-century Missouri turned them into corncob jelly.
The husks stuffed early American mattresses — Abraham Lincoln was born on a bed of cornhusks and bearskins in a cabin somewhere south of Hodgenville, Kentucky — or were woven into horse collars. A process for turning cornhusks into paper was patented in 1802, although it doesn’t seem to have gone much of anywhere.
Cornstalks were fed to pigs and brewed into beer; and in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay colony, corn was accepted as legal tender, at least in transactions that didn’t specify cold cash or beaver pelts.
Columbus saw vast cornfields in the West Indies, and likely brought the first samples home on his second transatlantic voyage in 1493, along with an assortment of parrots. Within two generations of discovery, the appealing new crop had spread to Africa, India, Tibet, and China, where the emperor, with a sharp eye for the main chance, was already taxing it.
Along with the seed itself, Columbus brought back the native word for the grain — mahiz — which survives as the correct common name for American corn, maize. Much early confusion relative to the historical cultivation of maize stems from the European use of the word corn in a generic sense to mean kernel, as in peppercorn and corned beef, which was prepared with kernels
(corns) of salt. Corn was also the term used willy-nilly to refer to whatever the dominant grain of the country happened to be. Hence corn in England meant wheat; in Scotland, oats; and the “alien corn” in the Bible, in which Ruth stood about miserably, was most likely Mesopotamian barley. The all-purpose term promptly expanded to include the new American grain.
By 1542, when German herbalist Leonhart Fuchs published the first known maize illustration, he called it Turkish corn and claimed it came from Asia. The Turks, who denied all connection with it, called it Egyptian corn; the Egyptians called it Syrian corn; the Germans threw up their hands and called it Welschkorn, which means strange grain. Linnaeus, who assigned corn its scientific name in 1737, dubbed it Zea mays — mays a spelling variant of the original maize, and Zea, meaning “I live,” from the Greeks, who lightheartedly used the term for a number of different plants, among them true wheat.
Corn, along with wheat and rice, is one of the world’s staple crops, providing one-fifth of the planet’s total food energy. We’re dependent upon it — but not nearly as dependent as it is upon us. If people suddenly vanished from the Earth, corn would vanish with us. In those fat cobs of modern corn, the kernels — seeds — are trapped within the tightly wrapped husk, which functions as a sort of malignant chastity belt. Left to themselves, corn seeds cannot be dispersed: a fallen cob eventually sprouts a collection of infant seedlings so closely packed that their intense competition for water, food, and sunlight kills them off. Without the help of humans, a cob is a reproductive dud. Botanists call corn a “biological monstrosity.”