Skip to main content
Main

Pickled Celery

Pickled celery prepared by boiling celery in a vinegar, salt, ginger, and peppercorn mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 988 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pickled Celery

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Take the white part of fresh celery roots.

  2. Wash the celery and dry it.

  3. Cut the celery into short lengths before pickling.

Make and pour the pickle

  1. Prepare a pickle with 1 ¼ ounces of coarse sea salt, ½ ounce of ginger, and white peppercorns to taste in 1 quart of vinegar.

  2. Bring the vinegar mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the celery and boil for 2 minutes.

  4. Transfer the celery to dry stone jars and pour the pickle over it.

  5. Alternatively, let it cool and then bottle it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together988 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Vinegar + celerytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,627 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Ginger + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,126 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Celery roots
Provides the crisp, fibrous texture that holds up to pickling.
Vinegar
Acidity that preserves the celery and gives it its sharp, tangy flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the celery while helping preserve it.

The step that matters

Add the celery and boil for 2 minutes. Boiling only briefly softens the celery slightly while keeping it crisp. Boiling too long makes it soft and limp, and it may absorb too much of the vinegar flavour.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, celery):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, celery. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes