The Now Underrated Veggie That Was Practically Royalty During The Victorian Era

Celery's never landing on the list of slept-on vegetables to grow easily at home ... the "slept-on" part may be accurate, but celery is notably challenging for home gardeners. Celery's tricky cultivation was actually once a large part of its appeal, though, at least if you were a 19th-century Brit or American moving in high society circles. The Victorian era brought us the Central Park Boathouse in New York City, but it also saw a major fad for this stalky veg, which was displayed on lavish dinner tables in bespoke glassware appropriately called a celery vase.

It may surprise you to learn that the crunchy green celery we eat today wasn't always around. Wild celery is woody and pale; we still use it to harvest the kitchen spice celery seed. So, when lovely, leafy modern celery was first developed by Victorian scientists, high society denizens couldn't get enough of it. It was novel, expensive, and looked pretty — a combination that proved ravishing. 

Victorians liked to serve their celery upright (water immersion is the best way to store celery, so maybe they were on to something!) and nibbled it alongside olives and other components of a fancy dinner's "relish" course. As the turn of the century approached, fashions changed, and glamorous hostesses took to serving their celery flat on elongated glass dishes, making the celery vase passé. The celery craze itself lasted until the veggie became easier to grow. Once the hoi polloi could easily get their grubby mitts on it, chichi Victorians moved on to other trends.

Although its time as a status symbol fell off drastically by the turn of the 20th century, the first half of the 1900s saw a lot more celery on menus than today. Americans and Brits still noshed on celery as an appetizer, not dissimilar to how we serve it with Buffalo wings today, but that wasn't the whole of it. Celery made its way into soups and salads and was even braised in the oven Philadelphia-style. It may not have been the hottest thing in the culinary world anymore, but folks still appreciated celery more than we do today. Sure, you dice a lot of celery as a background ingredient in stuffing or Bloody Marys, but when's the last time you took a big, crispy bite of a celery stalk just for the love of the veg?

As it turns out, this near-forgotten veggie has a lot to recommend it! First of all, due to its incredibly high water content, celery is just about as low-calorie as solid foods get: one rib contains just 6 tiny calories. Don't think that celery has no substance, however. The leaves and stems contain antioxidants that discourage inflammation and might even fight off tumors (though research there is ongoing). Celery also promotes healthy digestion and combats metabolic syndrome. Also, celery is objectively a great snack that's fun to eat and plays well with a wide variety of flavors. So, the next time you see that package of bright, crunchy celery languishing in the produce section, think like a Victorian tastemaker and bring it home!