Over his grilled cheese and carrot sticks, Liam suggested an improvement to celery. “They should cross-pollinate it with crunchy iceberg lettuce. That would get rid of the strings in the celery.”
“Lettuce is delicate,” I observed. “I think the cross-pollination should be with something like water chestnuts. They’re sturdy and perhaps could overwhelm the strings in celery better than iceberg lettuce.”
Celery is something we would both like to like, but just thinking about taking a bite off the end of a piece of celery and feeling all those strings refusing to release? It brings me close to a gag reflex. As a raw vegetable, it’s nearly untouchable; if finely diced in a lobster roll that I order without asking what the ingredients are, I can eat it. Although I struggle with celery in its raw form, I fully acknowledge its usefulness as a cooked vegetable to flavor food like chicken broth, along with carrots and onions. And that makes me think there is a name for this veggie combo… and that it’s holy-something…
***Internet Search Interlude***
The Holy Trinity, in cooking terms, is the base of celery, onions, and green peppers in Cajun-style cooking. This sounds familiar from the days of making jambalaya when we would start with this trio in tiny, diced pieces and sauté them in butter until they became intertwined so tightly they looked and smelled like a new vegetable species. The Holy Trinity uses equal amounts of each vegetable.
Similarly, mirepoix, pronounced meer-pwah, originated in France and is a base of celery, onions, and carrots. The standard ratio of vegetables is heavy on the onions for mirepoix: 2 parts onion, 1 part celery, and 1 part carrots. Again, this finely diced vegetable base is cooked in butter on low heat until soft. The Irish Potato Chowder I make at Christmas time starts off with mirepoix simmered for ten minutes before adding the chicken stock and potatoes. Then the magic of the base simmer melds into the potatoes.
These combinations of vegetables and herbs are considered “aromatics.” Across cuisines, a standard base often defines the beginning flavor of a dish. These combinations anchor a taste profile for many ethnic foods, yet there is no absolute aromatic combination that defines one type of food. For instance, Chinese stir-fries might start with a quick cooking of ginger, scallion, and garlic, but if the dish is traditionally from the Hunan or Sichuan area of China, there’s a good chance for a pop of heat from chilies in the aromatic.
For Thai cuisine, shallots, chilies, garlic, and lemongrass are commonly used as an aromatic. This is one base that I’ve discovered from a bottle in the form of Red Thai Curry Paste. This beautiful shortcut houses the aromatics in one jar of intensity and makes it possible to create Jamie Oliver’s Red Thai Chicken Soup with only five ingredients. Basically, someone else has shopped the fresh aisle, then chopped and cooked down the aromatics to a thick paste that’s ready to set the stage for Thai cooking.
All of this aromatic chatter reminds be of a standby in many recipes from my past: Dry Onion Soup Mix. Do people ever make onion soup out of this? This seems like a kind of aromatic staple and reminds me of recipes found in hundreds of church cookbooks and Taste of Home magazine recipes. While a super boost in flavor, I take a closer look at the sodium content and remember why I rarely use those boxes of envelopes in my cupboard that expired in… 2007. Thinking about the bottled Red Thai Curry Paste, I should peek at its sodium content as well.
While recipes in this Taste of Home collection look tempting, dry onion soup mix is a world away from fresh celery, onion, and carrots building taste as they simmer away in a bit of butter.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_trinity_(cooking)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix
https://www.seriouseats.com/chinese-aromatics-101-mild-ginger-scallion-garlic
https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/chicken-recipes/thai-red-chicken-soup/
https://www.lindamalcolm.com/recipes/2019/11/17/irish-potato-chowder