To Dress Celery

This is a table-service preparation rather than a cooked dish: raw celery, trimmed, curled and stood in water. Almost all of it still works, but two words need translating and one habit has changed.

• "Dress" means trim and presentNo sauce or dressing is involved. In nineteenth-century usage, to dress a vegetable was to make it ready for the table, and here that means cleaning, splitting and arranging it.
• The celery glassA celery glass or celery vase was a tall footed glass, often eight to ten inches high, used to stand upright stalks in water at the centre of the table; the recipe has it half filled. Any heavy straight-sided tumbler, pitcher or narrow vase does the same job; the weight matters more than the shape, since loaded celery is top-heavy.
• The head, not the stalksThe recipe assumes a whole head with the root plate still attached, which is what held the quarters together when split. Supermarket celery is sold already trimmed at the base, so quartering will simply give you loose stalks. Buy the heaviest, tightest head you can find and cut only a thin slice from the bottom.
• Cold water is the working partStanding the stalks in cold water crisps limp celery by rehydrating it. Water with ice in it works better than merely cold tap water; allow twenty to thirty minutes before the meal.
• Curling the leavesThe recipe has you draw a skewer point through the top leaves, dividing them into strips about five inches from the top; the strips then curl outward in the water. A thin metal skewer, a trussing needle or the tip of a paring knife all work. Work with the grain and stop at the five-inch mark.
• Wash inside the ribsGrit collects at the base of the inner ribs where they overlap. Splitting the head first, then rinsing under running water with the cut faces upward, gets it out; soaking alone will not.
• YieldOne large head serves six to eight as a table relish; celery of this kind was commonly served plain, often with salt, on a relish dish.