a celery salad for the celery skeptic

you will eat the entire bowl and you will love it

i’m not a big fan of celery. it’s fine. i don’t hate it, but i also don’t love it. fill it up with peanut butter and yes, of course i will take it with delight, but it’s the peanut butter that’s making me smile, not the celery.

however, i’ve noticed something strange recently: if there’s a celery salad on a restaurant menu, i’m all but guaranteed to order it. more often than not, it ends up being my favorite dish of the meal. so do i actually love celery, deep down? or are the stringy stalks just a gateway to all the other delicious things people are pairing with it? probably both.

i’ve eaten at handful celery salads over the past few years, and i ended up thinking about each and every one hours or even days later, literally craving it. i can’t pinpoint exactly why, because all of the salads were served differently and incorporated different ingredients, but i can say without a doubt that the through-line lesson for me has been: a good celery salad is, like, really, really good. it’s crisp and fresh, sharp and salty. rich and nutty and tart. refreshing and clean and cold. a crave-able, scoop the bowl clean sort of salad.

so, after years of sitting on this knowledge, i finally did what i do best and took a few of my favorite things about the celery salads i’ve heretofore had the opportunity to eat and made my perfect celery salad. the celery salad that makes me question whether celery might just be my favorite vegetable, even though i know it’s not.

if you’ve made it to this point, perhaps already with a quick scan of the recipe below, and feel yourself unconvinced, i beg you to give it a shot. if, as written, you’re pursing your lips about this or that ingredient you don’t like (except the celery lol), please swap some of the ingredients out to make it more delightful to your palate. my main goal here is to convince you that celery salads are amazing and worthwhile because i for one want to eat and make more of them. so use what’s below as a blueprint, design one that will be most likely to persuade you, and i’ll be happy. here are some ideas to play around with:

• instead of walnuts, use almonds, hazelnuts or cashews

• swap in thinly sliced fennel, green apple, jicama or celery root for the kohlrabi, or add any of these in additionally

• use dried prunes, raisins, sultanas or dried figs instead of dates, or leave them out altogether; you could also candy the nuts to add sweetness

• use crumbles of a mild blue cheese, thickly grated young pecorino or small hunks of parmesan instead of cheddar

• skip the vinaigrette and simply toss through with plenty of lemon juice and olive oil

• add thinly sliced scallion or roughly chopped leaves of your favorite herb

another reason to love this salad is because it features a second misunderstood, oft-underrepresented vegetable: kohlrabi. if you’ve never had it, please try to change that asap. if i were to describe it, i would say it’s kind of like a delicious, slightly broccoli-y, slightly radish-y, crisp tender pear. it’s really good in this and many other salads, makes a great vegetarian schnitzel apparently, and is an amazing snack when sliced into wedges and dipped in tajín.

one last thing that’s a little bit off topic but i hope you don’t mind: i found the very act of making this celery salad very tactile and sort of meditative. it offered me a small mental release simply to use my bare hands to crush the pieces of walnuts, rip apart the dates, crumble the cheese and toss the salad together. i think physically touching and working with ingredients has to be one of my favorite things about cooking, to see how you can perform a sort of alchemy simply with your hands or a knife, and this salad really reminded me of that at the most basic level.

it will be a recipe i turn to not just because it’s delicious and i might be craving it, but also when i’m a bit anxious or sad or unwilling to cook, because i think the physical act of making it could lift me one step up and out of that feeling. this is all to say that i hope you use your hands as much as possible to make this recipe, whether you want a moment of meditation in the kitchen or you simply need to make something to eat.

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this time 2 years ago:

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my celery salad

serves 2-4

for the salad

4 tablespoons olive oil

50 grams walnuts

4 medjool dates

flaky sea salt

1/2 large or 1 whole small-ish bulb kohlrabi

5-7 ribs celery; 7 is celery-forward, 5 is celery-less-forward, lol

50 grams sharp white cheddar cheese

for the vinaigrette

1 lemon

1 shallot

1 1/2 teaspoons dijon mustard

1 clove garlic (optional)

salt

freshly grated black pepper

1. heat 4 tablespoons olive oil over low heat in a small frying pan. use your hands to crush 50 grams walnuts into irregular pieces directly into the pan. tear 4 dates into the pan, discarding the pits. let sizzle until the dates are deeply browned and sort of crisped and the walnuts are toasted, about 3-5 minutes. strain in a fine meshed sieve set over a heatproof bowl. season with a pinch of flaky sea salt.

2. peel 1/2 large or 1 whole small-ish bulb kohlrabi, removing any woody areas. halve and use the thinnest setting on a mandoline to thinly slice; if you don’t have a mandoline, use a sharp chef’s knife or even your vegetable peeler to get thin slices of kohlrabi. slice 5-6 celery ribs, not too thin. use your hands to crumble 50 grams cheddar cheese into irregular chunks.

3. peel and mince 1 shallot. add the now mostly cooled olive oil from toasting the walnuts and dates to a large bowl. juice in half the lemon and add the minced shallot and 1 1/2 teaspoons dijon mustard. use a microplane to grate in 1 clove garlic, if using. mix the vinaigrette well, then season with salt and pepper to taste.

4. add the cheese, walnuts, dates, celery and kohlrabi to the vinaigrette and toss directly in the bowl, preferably with your hands. taste and season with more salt, pepper, lemon juice and olive oil as desired. serve immediately, let the salad rest at room temperature for up to an hour or chill for up to 2 days.