Ingredients · Spice

Celery Seed

Apium graveolens · Apiaceae (carrot family)

Celery Seed
Tiny, and far stronger than its size suggests — celery seed is concentrated celery, grassy and warm with a savoury depth that reads almost as saltiness even without salt. Three products carry it. It is the ingredient nobody can name in a good coleslaw or a jar of bread-and-butter pickles, and its flavour fades with long cooking, so it belongs in cold dishes and late additions more than in a stew.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partSeed
KindSpice
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromIndia
TasteConcentrated celery — grassy, warm, slightly bitter, with a savoury, almost salty depth

How to use it

In coleslaw, potato salad, tuna and egg salad. In pickling brine, where it is one of the standard seeds — bread-and-butter pickles especially. In tomato juice and Caesar mix. Ground with salt it becomes celery salt. Crush it lightly before use. Add it late; long cooking flattens it.

With food

Cabbage and carrot. Potato. Tomato. Eggs. Cucumber pickles. Mayonnaise and buttermilk. Crab and shrimp. Beef.

With spices

Mustard seed and dill, in a pickling brine. Black pepper. Turmeric, in bread-and-butter pickles. Paprika. Bay.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient.

Its story

Where it comes from

Celery is a Mediterranean plant brought into cultivation in France and England during the sixteenth century. Most of the world's celery seed now grows in Punjab — India took up the crop around 1940 with seed imported from France, and roughly 90 per cent of the Indian harvest comes from Punjab, where it is cut in late March when the umbels turn brown. Our lot names no origin.

What happened

In ancient Greece the same plant crowned athletes and wreathed the dead. The victors at the Nemean Games — dated from 573 BC — wore a crown of wild celery leaves from the city of Argos, and celery leaves and flowers were among the garlands in Tutankhamun's tomb. In Homer, the meadows around Calypso's cave grow wild celery, and the Myrmidons' horses graze on it in the marshes of Troy. Its modern chapter is a drink: the Caesar, created in Calgary in 1969, whose glass is rimmed with celery salt. And in New York, Dr Brown's Cel-Ray — a celery soda sold from 1869 and a fixture of Jewish delicatessens — was marketed as a pure beverage for the nerves.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

Every ingredient in the shop

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