Celeriac

Celeriac is a bulbous celery selected for hundreds of years for its round, juicy base.

22 June 2022
This week we pass the winter solstice and get excited about days lengthening again and more growth in the field. Happy Solstice everyone!

This week we have a new vegetable for the box, Celeriac! The delicious and versatile Celeriac takes months to grow, however with little pest or disease issues it’s been a pleasure to grow on our tiny farm. This has been a really great crop for us and we look forward to growing more next year.

Celeriac is a cultivated type of celery. Wild celery, Nan ling or Chinese celery, plain old regular tasty green celery and Celeriac are all varieties of the same plant Apium graveolens.

Wild celery has now spread across the world, going feral after cultivated types when to seed. It typically grows in soggy fresh or salt water environments.

Celeriac has been selected for the bulbous hypocotyl of the plant.

Before growing Celeriac I always thought it was the roots I was roasting and eating.

Celeriac has been cultivated since at least the 16th C by Arab peoples and European peoples. You can eat it raw in salads or roasted, pan fried, made into soups or stews or boiled and mashed. Its a sweet, nutty veggies with very little bitterness. If you want to reduce the familiar celery flavour you can peel it, but I think its so good roasted with its skin.

The greens on top can be eaten like celery because they pretty much are! To me they’re like a saltier, much less intense celery stalk. They’re more fibrous and I think better suited to being cooked rather than eaten raw, but thats just my preference.

The bulbous hypocotyl of the Celeriac lacks almost 50% of the compounds responsible for the distinct flavour and smell of other celery types. It also has unique compounds that don’t occur in other celery types. Its so cool that for at least 500 years people have been selecting and breeding this amazing and unique celery type that has such a rich, nutty flavour.

We often consider industrial agriculture as being the antithesis of wild plant appreciation. And while there is so much in that industry to be critical of, there are facets of it where our values align.

An example of this occurs in cataloguing and preserving wild populations of plants. I came across the Wild Celery Network and its an interesting project out of Germany. The project works with farmers of varying scales, conservationists, seed breeders from universities and some of the biggest seed producers in the world. They maintain wild populations in the environment across lots of locations around Germany, and keep samples in gene banks.

In an article on the project the writers aptly describe industrial agricultures impetus for projects like these:

"The growing importance of Crop Wild Relatives in breeding underlines the need for improved species conservation programmes, especially considering the global extinction and genetic erosion threat to wild plant species. Conserving plants in nature ensures the plants and their pests or diseases continue to evolve together, so potentially offering more up-to-date resistance.”

Tonight when we roast our whole Celeriac to celebrate the Solstice, I’m going to think about those home cooks and gardeners who took a fancy to Celeriacs bulbous hypocotyl taste and flavour over the last 6 hundred years. I’m thinking of all those diverse wild populations of celery, for those people who harvest and cook with them today, and for the researchers in the huge gene banks that keep records of those plants for the future.