History and Lore

Cultivated for its starch-storing roots rather than its stalks, celery root was developed from wild celery (Apium graveolens), a member of the parsley family. Celery is one of the first vegetables to appear in recorded history, a common plant in Europe, the Middle East, and the temperate parts of Asia. Confucius reports that celery (wild celery) was in use in China before 500 B.C., and Homer comments on it, calling it selinon, in the Odyssey. The ancient Egyptians gathered the plant for its seeds, which they used as a flavoring; the Greeks championed it for medicinal purposes; and it was associated with funerals in both cultures. Alan Davidson, in his estimable The Oxford Companion to Food, notes that in 1536, botanical writer Ruellius (a.k.a. Jean Ruel) mentions that the root of smallage (a term for wild celery) was consumed both cooked and raw. Later, in 1613, Swiss physician and botanist J. Bauhin wrote of a celery plant developed for its large root in his Historia plantarum univeralis, a seminal work that remained unpublished until 1650.