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Curling Celery
Slit the stalks with a penknife closely should the fringe be too fine, taking care that the slits all end at an even line. If a large amount of celery is used every day set on the tables in celery glasses, a sort of rake is used in place of the penknife, and this rake is made by driving a number of the three-edged sacking needles of the very smallest size through a soft piece of cigar boxwood. The celery ends are combed with this and then put in glasses of ice-water to cool at leisure.
This is a garnish technique rather than a dish, and it still works: the curl comes from cold water, not from the cutting. Everything below is about getting the fringe even and the curl tight.
- The hinge is the ice waterThe slit ends curl only after the stalk sits in very cold water; the cutting alone does nothing. Half an hour or more in genuinely iced water gives the tightest curl; water that is not properly cold gives a much weaker one.
- Cut to an even lineOscar's insistence that "the slits all end at an even line" is the whole of the trick. Ragged stopping points give a shaggy, uneven fringe. Score two to three inches up from the end of the stalk and stop at a fixed mark.
- The improvised rakeThree-edged sacking needles are the triangular-shafted needles once used for stitching burlap, and cigar-box wood was a soft, commonly reused scrap in a household of this period. A stainless steel kitchen fork, a zester with fine channels, or a clean fine-toothed comb reserved for kitchen use will comb a stalk just as well and can be washed properly.
- Do not use a wooden handle for thisSoft, unfinished wood pierced with needles cannot be sanitized. If you want a raking tool, buy or make one in metal or hard plastic.
- Celery glassesThese were tall footed vessels, roughly the shape of a spooner, set on the table so diners took celery by hand. A narrow tumbler or a bud vase does the same job; fill with a little ice water to keep the curls crisp at table.
- Modern celery is differentPascal celery, now the supermarket default, is thicker and greener than the blanched pale celery of the 1890s. Use the inner stalks, which are thinner and curl more readily, and peel the strings off the coarse outer ribs first.
- QuantityFigure two or three curled stalks per person as a relish course.
Celery held a status at the American table in the 1890s that it has entirely lost. It was expensive to grow, requiring trenching and blanching, and a head of it was displayed upright in a purpose-made glass as evidence that the household could afford it, alongside olives and salted almonds in the relish course. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, described a homemade combing rake rather than a penknife, prefacing the method with a condition — "If a large amount of celery is used every day" — which suggests that at banquet scale, a garnish that takes a minute a stalk is not a garnish, it is a job. The Waldorf's most famous dish, the salad that carries the hotel's name, leaned on the same ingredient in the same years. Pressed-glass celery vases survive in quantity in antique shops, which is the clearest measure of how ordinary the ritual once was.