So-called “soup celery” – the dark green, thin-stalked, highly nutritious, perennial predecessor of the less-potent but more-manageable and transportable celery we see in supermarkets today – ranks among my favourite vegetables to grow, consume and preserve.
Soup celery, known also as wild celery, smallage and Chinese celery, is gorgeous as a landscape plant, and, due to its herb-level pungency, displays impressive built-in pest management qualities.
While conventional celery, that tightly bound bouquet of canoe-shaped squeezy pseudo-cheese holders, is much-loved for its crunch and neutral palate, soup celery can knock your salivary socks off.
Considered by herbalists as a detoxification plant, Apium graveolens contains potent antioxidant compounds like caffeic acid, p-coumaric acid, ferulic acid, apigenin, luteolin, tannin, saponin, and kaempferol. Limonene, selinene, frocoumarin glycosides and vitamins A and C tag along also, as do many other phytochemicals with names we don’t run across very often.
Natural medicines aside, I love soup celery for its thin stalks and strong flavour. I can cut a few stalks and dice them up into a tidy and uniform stack in a jiff, without the hassle of first slicing broad stalks lengthwise. The wee dice lasts for ages in the fridge, and can be frozen for mirepoix, soup, smoothies and myriad other uses.
This past week, after cutting six one-metre-tall stands of soup celery going to seed, I sliced and diced plenty for cooking and freezing, added not-too-much (strong flavour) to the worm composts, and generally composted a very large tub full of gorgeous bright green biomass. I was confident that its nutrient-dense goodness will stay on site, returning to the garden eventually, feeding the soil and its microbiology.
The sadness I felt chopping away at such beautiful plants, was replaced with joy seeing the sunlight reaching back to the struggling kohlrabi, and warming the soil beneath the iron obelisks that will soon trellis Ya-Ya beans and late-planted peas. The soup celery will come again of course, but when it does the infant kohlrabi and beans will have grown too tall to care.
Joy sparked inspiration as well, for a re-imagined Waldorf salad built around chopped soup celery stalks, chiffonade leaves and beautiful blossoms. A quick turn around the garden yielded some lovely nut-buttery arugula to soften the bite of the celery, a bowl full of jostaberries in place of grapes traditionally used in Waldorfs, some white and red currants and wild strawberries to roast, and a handful of whisper-soft shoots from bronze and green fennel.
The original Waldorf salad, named for the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York where it was conceived in 1896, contained chopped celery, apple, grapes and walnuts dressed in mayonnaise. Innovative, but boring by modern standards.
Our version was exotic by comparison and owed most of its deliciousness to the just-picked nature of the greens and berries.
Diced soup celery stalks, chiffonade leaves, torn arugula leaves and flowers, chopped fennel fronds, crumbled toasted walnuts, oven-roasted berries and diced red apple from Klippers Organics (Trout Lake Farmers Market) established the theme.
For protein and for bulk, we folded in some diced, still-warm, poached pastured chicken breast and a light dressing made from high-fat, high-protein goat yogurt, white balsamic, Dijon mustard and extra virgin olive oil. A final flourish of crunchy Vancouver Island flaked sea salt cut the fat from the dressing and the sweet from the roasted berries.
Delicious, nutritious, home-grown and locally sourced perfection on a plate, inspired by a humble and misunderstood vegetable grown from seed in our urban front garden.
Laura Marie Neubert is a West Vancouver-based urban permaculture designer. Follow her on Instagram @upfrontandbeautiful, learn more about permaculture by visiting her Upfront & Beautiful website or email your questions to her here.
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