Summer is officially around the corner, but for some reason, I’ll be making chicken soup this week — even in warm weather, it’s a staple in my household. The recipe calls for a full chicken, cut in pieces; a healthy amount of dill and perhaps an unhealthy amount of bullion; diced celery, carrots, and onions (also known as mirepoix); and a lot of water. Boil it all, add rice, noodles, or matzah balls to taste, and you’ve got a stew — er, soup going. And it’s not going to break the bank, either — most of the ingredients aer very affordable.

But a century and a half ago, it definitely wasn’t — because of the celery.

Celery wasn’t always the easiest vegetable to cultivate. Wild varieties were unpleasant — much more bitter, tougher, and stringier than the celery we eat today. To grow something edible, farmers need to maintain precise growing conditions that nature didn’t always allow for. And, as Epicurious notes, traditional celery was so bitter that growers often buried the stalks under soil or wrapped them in paper — a process called blanching — to keep sunlight off them, as this reduced the bitterness noticeably. It seems like a lot of work for a vegetable we now give to rabbits.

But that effort made celery rare and, therefore, sought after by the gourmands of the Victorian era. Upper-class households displayed the vegetable in elaborate cut crystal vases designed specifically for the purpose, positioned at the center of the dining table like a floral arrangement. It was common for celery to appear in all sorts of dinner party recipes, much like truffles tend to do today. Having celery at your soiree proved that you were someone important.

And the phenomenon wasn’t limited to private events. According to the New York Public Library’s collection of 17,000 historical restaurant menus, celery was the third most frequently featured item for much of the late 1800s, appearing on one out of every four menus — trailing only coffee and tea. And the prices reflected its status. On one menu from the era, celery sold for 35 cents while caviar went for just a quarter. Celery eating was a status symbol — British journalist George Augustus Sala, traveling through the United States in 1879, marveled at the “inexhaustible plentitude of the health giving celery which American diners almost incessantly nibble on from the beginning to the end of their repasts,” per WNYC. In Kalamazoo, Michigan — which styled itself “Celery City” because celery became a huge cash crop in the area — urban legend held that young men would show up to dates bearing stalks of celery tied with ribbon instead of roses, per American’s Test Kitchen.

But of course, none of that is true today. As demand for the green sticks grew, so did the incentive to invest in better technology and practices for its cultivation. Farmers began to grow it in much larger quantities, and the law of supply and demand took over — higher supply meant lower prices, and lower prices eroded celery’s status. Today, it’s the vegetable equivalent of a footnote, something you throw into a chicken soup without a second thought. But for a brief moment, celery was the centerpiece everyone showed up for.

More About Chicken Soup

Today’s Bonus fact: Chicken soup isn’t only for people — it’s also good for decorating buildings, apparently. As Scouting New York notes, there’s a building on upper Manhattan that features stone gargoyles, which isn’t all that unusual, given that the building was first built in 1909. But the gargoyle sculptures aren’t standing watch over the street — they’re eating a meal. The four gargoyles, which you can see close-up photos of at that link, are making a soup. One is reviewing what looks like a ledger or a cookbook. The next is holding a plate of chicken. The third is eating from a bowl, and the fourth is stirring a pot. It’s not known why the building is decorated this way, or whether you can get a good bowl of soup there.

From the Archives: The Restaurant With A Rotating Grandma On The Menu: You can get grandmas’ chicken soup there, sometimes, and the apostrophe isn’t in the wrong place.