Food fashions come and go, just like any other. For the last few years it’s been kale. Lobster was once fed only to workers, but now we think of it as a Luxury Protein. Celery is now rather ho-hum, the dress-it-up hors d’oeuvre and dress-it down snack, and the more substantial half of the Rich White Woman’s Diet*. Indeed, one Learned Overseas Friend of Etiquetteer’s describes celery as “a vegetable to be endured more than talked about.**” But since March is National Celery Month, why not take a quick look at its previous, honorable participation on the dinner menu?
Heather Arndt Anderson provides a delightful overview of the Victorian Celery Vogue at Taste. The upper crust fashion for celery plus the Industrial Revolution plus the middle-class desire to ape the rich produced the celery vase, a tall glass vase often with a foot, and big enough for a heads-worth of celery stalks. (Let’s hope the servants remembered to cut off the bottom so that no one inadvertently pulled out the entire head when reaching for a stalk.) Etiquetteer was astonished to learn celery vases were used as a table centerpiece. One can see a certain vegetarian charm in that — much like a bride carrying one enormous ornamental cabbage as her bouquet — but these days it doesn’t seem very dressy to have an edible centerpiece. And imagine what it would look like near the end, with just one or two random, sad celery stalks languishing away.
A celery vase in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Like the cruet stand, the celery vase didn’t even make it to World War I; fashions changed! Celery still had a place at the table, but in low glass dishes, not vases. But were they really a separate course in a dinner? Emily Post Herself isn’t much help (!) until the 1950 edition, and then all she indicates is that celery is passed with the olives during the soup course. Passed. This means they are not permanently stationed on the dinner table like fruit or candy. Millicent Fenwick, writing Vogue’s Book of Etiquette, is just a wee bit more helpful. She gives hostesses a pass not to serve celery or olives “only for the sake of custom.” So if there just isn’t any good celery out there, leave it off. “Whatever it is, it must be served for its own sake, because it is good and not because one feels that guests might expect it.” This seems eminently sensible.
Etiquetteer discerns from these Worthy Sources that celery is now served only with the soup at formal dinners, and celery and olives are cleared after the soup is cleared. For our own day-to-day dining, celery is often best left on the crudité tray to enjoy or endure as you prefer with drinks before coming to the table.
*The other half is white wine.
**Just don’t talk with your mouth full.