Home › The Principles of Cookery › Celery, to Dress
Celery, to Dress
Cut off the end of the root, leaving the white part; wash it very carefully, trim away all the decayed leaves and outer stalks, and if the root be very thick, split it into quarters. Send it to table in a celery glass half filled with cold water. Curl the top leaves by drawing the point of a skewer through them, dividing them into strips about five inches from the top.
This is a table-service preparation rather than a cooked dish: raw celery trimmed, curled and stood upright in water. Almost everything in it still works, but the vessel and the celery itself have changed.
- The celery glassA celery glass was a tall, heavy-footed cut-glass vase, roughly 7-9 inches high, made specifically to hold a head of celery upright on the table. Any straight-sided tumbler or narrow vase of similar height does the same job.
- "Split it into quarters"Victorian celery was grown blanched in trenches or with earth banked up, producing thick, pale, often coarse heads. Modern supermarket celery is much slimmer; splitting is usually unnecessary, though halving a very large head lengthwise makes it easier to eat.
- Curling the leavesDraw a skewer or the point of a paring knife down the top five inches of the leafy stalks, as the recipe specifies, to shred them into strips, then stand the head in ice water for 20-30 minutes. The strips curl as they take up water. Cold water alone, as written, curls them slowly; ice water is faster and crisps the stalks at the same time.
- Trimming the rootCut away the fibrous base but leave the pale solid heart intact so the stalks stay joined and the head stands up in the glass. Peel any stringy outer ribs with a swivel peeler.
- GritThe instruction to "wash it very carefully" is the hinge. Earth lodges deep between the ribs at the base; run water down into the head from the top, or separate the outer stalks and rinse individually before reassembling.
- Yield and servingOne head serves four to six as part of a table setting. Traditionally it went out with the cheese, or alongside cold meat, with salt in a small dish for dipping.
- Holding timePrepared this way it keeps well for several hours if the water is kept cold and the glass is out of direct sun. Refresh the water before it goes to table.
Specialised celery glasses and boat-shaped celery dishes appear in English glass and porcelain catalogues from the late eighteenth century onward and were a fixture of the Victorian dinner table, which suggests how routine the dish had become by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary. The skewer-curling trick belongs to the same period's taste for garnish as ornament -- the same impulse that produced radish roses and butter curls. Celery's association with the cheese course is still current in Britain.