Celery Tincture & Alcohol-Free Extract

Celery (Apium graveolens) is a biennial of the carrot family, Apiaceae, native to marshy, saline ground around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, where the wild form, smallage, still grows, and bred into the crisp-stalked vegetable in Italy and France in the seventeenth century. In its first year it forms a bunch of ribbed, succulent leaf stalks 30 to 60 centimeters tall; in the second it bolts to a meter with loose umbels of tiny greenish-white flowers. The fruits, sold as celery seed, are minute, ribbed, grey-brown ovals with a strong, warm, bitter celery flavor that goes into celery salt and pickling spice. We extract the dried fruit.