Celery (Apium graveolens) is the crisp, ribbed leaf-stalk of a marsh-loving plant in the carrot family, native to the wetlands of the Mediterranean and harvested as a fan of pale-to-mid-green petioles topped with feathery leaves. Snapped raw, a stalk is watery and emphatically crunchy, grassy-green and faintly peppery with a clean, saline-savoury freshness and a whisper of bitterness. Cooked, that sharp herbal bite mellows into a soft, rounded, almost sweet savouriness, which is why celery is one of the three vegetables — alongside onion and carrot — that form the aromatic base of so much of Western cooking. Its smell is unmistakable: a green, peppery, slightly medicinal scent that no other vegetable quite duplicates.