celery
It is much too late for it to be topical, but as a cooking hobbyist I can tell you that celery is a French thing generally. Specifically it is part of what they call the “mirepoix,” a combination of vegetables that enhances the flavor of meat and meat stock. The classic continental French mirepoix is carrot, onion, and celery. Chicken stock and beef stock are cooked with these vegetables, among other things. The Cajun equivalent is “trinity,” in which red bell pepper is substituted for the carrots. In England it is parsnips that are substituted for the celery, at least for lamb, veal, and fish stocks and soups based on them.
This is mirepoix before it gets dumped into the pan with chicken, salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic.
Oh. Cursed food, huh? Once I made a from-scratch butter pie crust and had managed to run out of salt. The crust of a pie for a sweet filling needs a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar to make it taste like pie crust and not like compacted Wonder Bread. I substituted MSG for the salt, and made a blackberry pie with it. It turns out that salty umami can’t really be swapped out for salt in a fruit pie without dire gustatory consequences. I won’t be doing that again.
But it’s not as bad as a late relative of mine, who baked a chocolate cake, and needed butter to make chocolate buttercream frosting. She was out of butter, shortening, margarine, and even lard. But she was a Southern woman and she had some bacon grease. She reasoned that butter and bacon grease were both mostly fat, and the strong flavors of cocoa powder and vanilla would surely cover up any other flavors that bacon grease might bring in, so she was determined to adapt, improvise, and overcome. As it turned out, her reasoning was flawed. She didn’t do that again.