Meatless Monday Adventures: The Once Intimidating Celeriac

At this time of year, as the fresh local produce familiar to me begins to disappear, I do my best to try new things. My culinary discovery for this week is Celeriac (A. graveolens variety rapaceum), also known as Celery Root (or Knob Celery, or Turnip-rooted Celery).

This very strange looking root is actually a close relative of celery (A. graveolens variety dulce). It has only recently begun to appear at larger farmers’ markets and in the produce aisle of stores like Whole Foods. Celeriac can be eaten cooked or raw. With its very strong celery-like taste, celeriac is an excellent base for a slaw-like salad and a flavorful addition to soups and stews.

Celeriac is a good source of fiber, potassium, magnesium, manganese, and vitamin B6. It is also a very good source of vitamin C and phosphorous. Celeriac has considerably fewer calories than potatoes, and is only 5-6% starch by weight. It can be cooked and mashed as a tasty alternative for those who are cutting calories or have dietary restrictions due to diabetes.

Through Google Books I uncovered a classic volume, Cyclopedia of American Horticulture, published in 1901. Here I discovered that celeriac’s history as a garden vegetable can be traced back to the middle of the seventeenth century. Although little known in the US at that time, it was much prized in Europe where some 15-20 varieties were mentioned in the current seed catalogues. Celeriac’s principal use was listed as a flavoring for soups and stews, but the entry also made reference to boiled celeriac served with white sauce, to celeriac salad, and to an extract with medicinal properties. If you are interested in growing your own, this volume also offers plenty of horticultural advice. 

But back to my experiment. Following the recommendation of every source I could find, I selected and purchased a root heavy for its size, and weighing between 3/4 and 1 lb. In order to prepare it for cooking, I cut off a slice from each end and then trimmed off the skin with a paring knife. I worked quickly to prevent the discoloration to which a naked celery root is prone.

Next time I will add some celery root with carrots, and maybe parsnips, to my Split Pea Soup. But this time I opted for something simple. I diced my root and boiled it along with about 2 lbs. of russet potatoes until they were tender, and then I drained and mashed the lot of them with milk, butter, pepper and just a bit of freshly grated parmesan cheese. They were delicious: the celeriac imparted a nice celery flavor. It’s a good thing the dish was lower in calories than a traditional potato mash, because the two of us ended up with very few leftovers.

I should say that I have since learned that many recipes advise cooking the potatoes and the celeriac separately because the celery root cooks quicker. I did not find this a problem, and I had one less dirty pan this way.

My next celeriac experiment may well be Jamie Oliver’s Celeriac Gratin. I will follow the directions explicitly (once I convert them to American measurements), and I’ll let you know how the dish turns out. This Australian WeightWatchers site also has quite a few delicious-sounding recipes.

Happy experimenting. 


I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal health and the health of our planet.

Food Rules

Many of us in the US are eating large quantities of food which has traveled many miles to get to our tables, most of it highly processed and overly-packaged. There is little dispute that how we eat in in this country is making us unhealthy. And it’s also not very Green.

Several years ago, Michael Pollan set out to discover exactly what we should eat to be healthy. He came up with a succinct seven word formula: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He elaborated on this answer in the best-selling In Defense of Food, in which he contends that “most of the nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century…has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter.” In this book Pollan also delved into the history of the Western diet and the diseases of civilization, and concluded with a guide to healthier and happier eating.  

For those of you short on time but still wanting to eat well, let me recommend Pollan’s newest offering, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, a handy pocket guide for which no knowledge of science is required, a perfect companion to In Defense of Food.  In this slim volume, he presents 64 simple rules on how to eat well (more than seven words, but still easy to manage.)

Some of my favorite rules include: Rule 13: “Eat only foods that will eventually rot;” Rule 20: “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of you car;”  and Rule 64: “Break the rules once in a while.”

To find material for this guide Pollan solicited help from a number of sources, including the readers of Tara Parker-Pope’s New York Times online blog Well. In response to the words: “I’d like your help gathering some rules for eating well.” (posted on Well on March 9, 2009), he received 2,791 comments. (I am comment No. 2201 on page 89 of the blog.)  He acknowledges that this “overwhelming response enriched the project immeasurably” and thanks us all (as a group) in both the introduction and the credits.

I don’t want to spoil the book for you, so I will just mention one more rule — 52: “Buy smaller plates and glasses. The bigger the portion, the more we will eat —upward of 30% more.”

Coincidentally, portion size was much in the news last week. In a paper published in the Obesity Journal on March 23, Brian Wansink, a food behavior scientist at Cornell University, and his brother, Craig Wansink, professor of religious studies at the Virginia Wesleyan College and an ordained Presbyterian minister, announced the results of their study of 52 Last Supper paintings made between the years 1000 and 1800. The results are summarized by Dave Itzkoff in his Arts Beat blog (New York Times online March 23). “After the sizes of the food in the art works were indexed against the average size of the disciples’ heads (which can vary from painting to painting), the study found that the main courses grew by 69 percent, the plates grew by 66 percent and the size of the bread grew by 23 percent.” If art mirrors life, then this study confirms that we have indeed been upping our serving sizes for far more years than we had realized (and if Michael Pollan is correct, the amount of food we consume).

Also in the news is Britain’s Jamie Oliver, aka The Naked Chef, who has been taking on the lunch ladies of Huntington, West Virginia (dubbed the unhealthiest metropolitan area in America) on primetime TV in the hopes of reforming their school lunch program. I am pretty sure Huntington hasn’t heard about Meatless Monday or Food Rules. If you watch the show, you will learn that some of the school children can’t recognize a potato, let alone a beet or a tomato. Jamie is doing his best to get the children to eat more plants, but he has a difficult road ahead. You can follow the saga on Friday nights on ABC for the next few weeks.

Let me urge you once again to check out Food Rules and to share its wisdom with those you love. It is a quick and entertaining read. The rules are simple and painless, and by following them you will be making yourself, those you feed, and the planet healthier.