Visiting my daughter in Spain, standing in a market surrounded by gloriously red peppers and the ripest of tomatoes, I suddenly saw “a dirty, knobby, alien-looking root,” as one food writer describes it: Apium graveolens var. rapaceum, aka celeriac. A cousin of celery, fennel, carrots and parsnips, this bulbous, bumpy orb is my wife’s absolute favorite root vegetable, although I’ve often pointed out to her that celeriac is not a root but a hypocotyl. She counters, “Say that three times.” 

The hypocotyl, according to my dictionary, is that part of the stem beneath the stalks of the leaves and directly above the root. So, on that balmy Spanish evening we had hypocotyl remoulade, a classic French dish that Anne first discovered in a Paris automat. She chose what she thought was slaw; instead, she discovered something sublime. Since then, she’s been on a long journey — completely unsuccessful — of trying to grow celeriac.  “One English gardener says ‘Celeriac is easy to grow,’” I tell her.“‘Hardier and more disease-resistant than celery.’” Says Anne, “You’ll recall that we’ve never been able to grow celery.”

Over the years, she’s told everyone who’ll listen about ordering the seeds and putting them into grow pots, only to have not a single one come up. The next year, she decided our wood stove-heated house was too cold, so she invested in a grow mat; voila, that spring she coached three spindly seedlings out of the pots! Nursed  like the first borns they were, one of them survived transplanting. Thus, we harvested our treasured, first celeriac, a hypocotyl feast about the size of a black walnut. The following year was no better, so nowadays Anne resignedly buys them wherever she can get them, most reliably at Super G Mart on Market.

Among the oldest of “root” vegetables, celeriac was painstakingly cultivated, not for its stalks like celery, but for that unshapely, but oh-so-tasty bulb between the stem and the squiggly, anemic roots.

References date back to Mycenean Linear B. Homer mentions “selinon” (the Greek word for celeriac) in both the Iliad and Odyssey. Romans and Egyptians prized celeriac for its medicinal benefits, and one writer suggests the root was also used in religious ceremonies, though, for the life of me, I can’t imagine how. By 1623, the French, naturellement, were eating them. Soon, Europeans all over the continent were julienning, grating and slicing them. Americans, not so much.

Nevertheless, one of Martha Stewart’s acolytes proclaims that “celeriac is having a moment,” and points out that market forecasts for 2024 suggested a 42 percent increase in sales year to year. (No hoarding, please.) She quotes various celebrity chefs enthusing over the ugly bulb, celeriac puree in particular. If you like carrots, parsnips, fennel or turnips, especially combined with a comforting and slightly earthy note, you’ll likely like celeriac. Now that we’ve transitioned from our wood stove to central air, I’m hoping my favorite gardener will get out the grow mat, hatch a plethora of wee sprouts and nurse them into transplants that will, with any luck, grow into the ugliest vegetables in our garden — and on the planet.    — David Claude Bailey