The Seductions of Celery My Mother Died in the Summer of 2008, After a Good Cooking Does Not Depend on Whether the Dish Is Debilitating Series of Strokes

Simple Cooking Issue No. 93 FIve Dollars Memories of My Mother The Seductions of Celery My mother died in the summer of 2008, after a Good cooking does not depend on whether the dish is debilitating series of strokes. As anyone who has gone large or small, expensive or economical. If one has the art, through this sort of thing will know, it’s hard to shake then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy; whereas if one has not the art, not all away the images of those final days. For me, the most the greatest delicacies and rarities of land, sea or sky are of haunting of these was a moment at the nursing home any avail. — Yuan Mei (18th-century poet and epicure) when, looking over a sea of aged people, I realized that my eye had passed right by my mother and not hen I started work on my first cookbook back in the recognized her at all. She had a month or so yet to live, early eighties, I had already been cooking, after my but the animating qualities that made her a distinctive Wfashion, for over a decade, and I thought I knew a person had already fled. So, for her memorial service, thing or two. I don’t exactly dismiss this — youthful en- I produced a pamphlet of my memories, letting these thusiasm has its own virtues, and I feel a familial sense of come as they wished, without worrying about their fondness for the person who typed up the now yellowing significance — their purpose was to recapture and manuscript. On the other hand, I wouldn’t fool anybody hold fast to a sense of presence. Not a few of these by inserting some of its reams of unused material into related to food — if only tangentially — and since my this publication (the book was never finished, never pub- mother has not appeared much in these pages, I want lished). The voice in those pages no longer sounds like me. to share them, and her, with you now. For one thing, there is the persistently annoy- ing presence of a fellow who, having learned something, feels that you desperately need to know it, too. One such d Salad d counsel — the reason why I’m writing about this at all fter we children grew up and went our separate — was to take note of the foodstuffs that you persist in ways, my father and mother began to organize buying, only to find later on, again and again, that they’ve Abreakfast and lunch to suit themselves. Lunch, spoiled or gone past their sell date. We should accept the especially, acquired a pretty invariable formula, featur- fact that we really don’t like these things, I opined, and ing a sandwich made from a Pepperidge Farm or Arnold deal firmly with whatever misguided sense of duty makes country-style loaf, meat (often turkey breast but also us buy them.* Virginia ham or roast beef) and low-calorie Swiss cheese, In the manuscript, the example I used was taken accompanied by a salad. * This may be true, but I didn’t then understand that my real prob- This last was not at all the usual handful of lem sprang from my on-again, off-again interest in eating things, shredded iceberg topped with a few slivers of tomato. The a problem with which I still contend. I decide I love something and salad was Mother’s chef-d’œuvre, and it easily took her buy a carload of the stuff. Then the light switches off, and it’s as half an hour to assemble it. Consequently, despite the if it were in someone else’s pantry. When the light comes on again (if ever it does), I find that the sell-by date expired three years ago. many times I watched her make it, I still find it hard to (Still tastes pretty good, though.) remember all its necessary parts. I can confidently start the list with romaine let- tuce, which served as the base. Onto this were cut slices of tomato, slivers of green pepper, little florets of broccoli and cauliflower, bits of red salad onion, and cucumber. There was a choice of commercial salad dressings—one a jazzed-up oil and vinegar concoction, the other something lusciously creamy with, say, poppy seeds or blue cheese. We’re still not through. If the dressing was the frosting on the cake, there remained the final touch— croutons and bacon-suggestive salad toppings to serve as the equivalent of sugar flowers and candy sprinkles. You might imagine all this covering an entire dinner plate, even a platter, but that wasn’t true. It was a labor of love, continued on page 6 from my own cooking life: the ritual purchase of celery. over fifty-odd years, my eyes refuse to pause when they There was always a withered half-used head of this in come to it in a menu). Still, one cannot love Chinese food the vegetable drawer, the stalks limp-wristed, the stem without noticing how they cook vegetables, and I was an unappetizing pinkish brown. Since I wasn’t then (nor surprised and delighted at how delicious celery became am I now) a compulsive nibbler of the crisp raw stalks, I when stir-fried in the Chinese manner. used it mostly as a flavoring addition to soups and stews As you will see when you turn the page, the — when I remembered I had some at hand. Chinese have their own variety of celery, which is much In fact, I considered celery a dubious legacy from closer to the wild kind than our own. However, according my parent’s generation, the vegetable equivalent of, say, to Martha Dahlen and Karen Phillipps in A Market Guide Perry Como or Doris Day. For them, celery salt was a gen- to Chinese Vegetables, the Cantonese choose what they teel replacement for garlic salt (or, God forbid, real garlic), call “foreign celery” far more often than the native variety, condensed cream of celery soup the stand-in when cream “presumably because of the former’s milder taste and of mushroom was a bit too … adventurous. more tender texture.” Even as a child, I’d found celery and carrot sticks Furthermore, while we Occidentals think that on the appetizer tray to be a cheat on a par with getting Chinese food should somehow always manage to taste underpants for Christmas, and by the time I was twenty “Chinese,” indigenous cooks don’t worry about that. When I had had my lifetime fill of raw celery stuffed with “bleu” I started stir-frying celery myself, I was surprised that the cheese. And one of the worst culinary memories of my best recipe I found, Ken Hom’s, as given in The Taste of youth was the “chow mein” dinners my mother made from China, is strictly about celery taste. Here’s how I do it. cans of La Choy, which seemed to consist mostly of bean sprouts and limp, stringy lengths of celery. Those weird, PleAse take noTe crispy “chow mein” noodles weren’t consolation enough.* The 2010 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, issued by the In truth, the fortunes of celery — and here I’m Environmental Working Group (www.ewg.org), rated talking strictly of the cooked vegetable — in anyone’s conventionally grown celery first in its list of the most kitchen rise and fall with the centrality of stewing. When pesticide-sprayed vegetables and fruits. Because of this, we try to buy only organic celery. (1) cheap meat was tough as leather, (2) frugality was a kitchen watchword, and (3) the household cook tended the stove all day, much of what the family ate was stewed, poached, braised. Nowadays, none of the above is true Stir-Fried Celery and pot vegetables have fallen out of fashion. The potato, [serves 4 as a side dish] of course, is infinitely adaptable; carrots make a decent 1 large head celery, root end and any discolored tips vegetable side dish and a lovely soup; but when is the trimmed away, stalks separated and carefully washed last time you ate mashed parsnips or stewed chunks of 2 tablespoons peanut oil (see note) purple-top turnip? 1 heaping teaspoon kosher salt Well, okay, probably yesterday. But that wasn’t true of my younger self. He, I, wanted the luxuries of 2 or 3 garlic cloves, finely minced roasted or grilled meat, of fried, roasted, or grilled chicken. 1/2 cup chicken stock I wanted crispy-skin duck. I wanted barbecued pork. • Taking the stalks one at a time, snap them into 3-inch Mostly, I didn’t cook anything wetly unless it was some- pieces, pulling away and discarding the tough strings from thing flagrantly unique (think beef stew made with Scotch each. (Usually this task is only necessary when dealing whisky). I looked at celery and my mind went blank. And with tough outer stalks. The tender, paler, inner ones can things stayed that way for a long time. just be cut into pieces with a knife.) Now cut each of these lengthwise into 1/4-inch strips. • Put the oil into a wok or large skillet and heat over a me- dium flame. When the oil is hot, add the salt and minced garlic and cook, stirring, until the garlic is translucent. Add the celery pieces, turning them over in the pan so that they are coated with the oil. Fry them, again stirring at short intervals, until the celery is softened.

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