by Rebecca Rupp
HOW CARROTS WON THE TROJAN WAR
HOW CARROTS WON
THE TROJAN WAR
Curious (but True) Stories of
Common Vegetables
Rebecca Rupp
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Edited by Deborah Burns
Art direction and book design by Mary Winkelman Velgos
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© 2011 by Rebecca Rupp
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rupp, Rebecca.
How carrots won the Trojan War / by Rebecca Rupp.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-60342-968-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Vegetables—History. 2. Vegetable gardening—History.
I. Title.
SB320.5.R87 2011
641.3′5—dc23
2011020049
For Randy,
who runs the rototiller
The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Vegetables In and Out of the Garden
CHAPTER ONE
In Which Asparagus Seduces the King of France
CHAPTER TWO
In Which Beans Beat Back the Dark Ages
CHAPTER THREE
In Which Beets Make Victorian Belles Blush
CHAPTER FOUR
In Which Cabbage Confounds Diogenes
CHAPTER FIVE
In Which Carrots Win the Trojan War
CHAPTER SIX
In Which Celery Contributes to Casanova’s Conquests
CHAPTER SEVEN
In Which Corn Creates Vampires
CHAPTER EIGHT
In Which Cucumbers Imitate Pigeons
CHAPTER NINE
In Which An Eggplant Causes a Holy Man to Faint
CHAPTER TEN
In Which Lettuce Puts Insomniacs to Sleep
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In Which Melons Undermine Mark Twain’s Morals
CHAPTER TWELVE
In Which Onions Offend Don Quixote
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In Which Peas Almost Poison General Washington
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In Which Peppers Win the Nobel Prize
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In Which Potatoes Baffle the Conquistadors
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In Which Pumpkins Attend the World’s Fair
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In Which Radishes Identify Witches
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In Which Spinach Deceives a Generation of Children
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In Which Tomatoes Fail to Kill Colonel Johnson
CHAPTER TWENTY
In Which Turnips Make a Viscount Famous
GENERAL SOURCES
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Vegetables In and
Out of the Garden
Did you ever know anyone who was not delighted by a garden?
JOHN SANDERSON
Nineteenth-century gardener Samuel Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester, dwelling cheerfully on the subject of his craft in 1899, wrote:
“I asked a schoolboy, in the sweet summertide, ‘What he thought a garden was for?’ and he said, Strawberries. His younger sister suggested Croquet, and the elder Garden-parties. The brother from Oxford made a prompt declaration in favor of Lawn Tennis and Cigarettes, but he was rebuked by a solemn senior, who wore spectacles, and more back hair than is usual with males, and was told that ‘a garden was designed for botanical research, and for the classification of plants.’ He was about to demonstrate the differences between Acoty- and Monocotyledonous divisions, when the collegian remembered an engagement elsewhere.”
Nowadays there’s no better agreement on the purpose of gardens. According to the latest poll sponsored by the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vermont, a gourmet 58 percent of respondents garden for better-tasting food; a thrifty 54 percent garden to save money; a worried 48 percent cite food safety concerns; and a generous 23 percent garden so that they’ll have food to share. Exercise, after healthful food, was among top reasons for gardening, according to a University of Illinois survey — the figure-conscious pointed out that an hour of moderate digging burns off a waist-whittling 300 calories.
Nobody mentioned fun, though it would be nice to think that the unclassifiable 9 percent in the NGA poll who listed their gardening reasons as “Other” are lighthearted fans of strawberries and croquet.
All told, such gardeners make up nearly half of all American households, a grand total of forty-three million home vegetable gardens. Top vegetable in these gardens, by a considerable margin, is the tomato, followed in dwindling order by cucumbers, peppers, beans, carrots, squash, and onions. All grow pretty well for us, too: nationally, home vegetable gardens generate an annual 21 billion dollars’ worth of food, which is no mean feat in these tricky times when every stray billion counts.
Vegetables, just as our mothers told us, are good for us. In fact, they’re essential. Fruits and vegetables, according to various estimates, supply 90 percent of our daily allotment of vitamin C, 50 percent of vitamin A, 35 percent of vitamin B6 25 percent of magnesium, and 20 percent each of niacin (B3), thiamine (B1), and iron. A diet heavy in vegetables reduces risks of cancer and cardiovascular disease, prolongs life expectancy, and makes us skinnier. And as author Michael Pollan points out, vegetables — unlike a lot of the questionable processed, manufactured, and additive-laden stuff found today in supermarkets — are real honest-to-God food.
For a substantial chunk of human history, however, a lot of people have turned their noses up at vegetables. In Europe, vegetables — unflatteringly dubbed “rude herbs and roots” — have a long history of disdainful neglect, with the exception perhaps of the ubiquitous onion. Medieval peasants made do for the most part with grain porridges and cheese, while their social superiors feasted carnivorously on swan, crane, and peacock, piglet draped in daffodils, chicken doused in almond milk, quail, partridge, pigeon, rabbit, venison, and veal.
Nutritionally, there’s a lot to be said for crane, peacock, and roasted rabbit. Protein analyses show that meat, in terms of supplying our necessary amino acids, is a nearly perfec
t food, almost the equivalent of that nutritional gold standard, the egg. The Neanderthals subsisted nicely on red meat, and Methuselah’s steady diet of it supported his legendary lifespan of 969 years.
A dinner party thrown by Samuel Pepys in 1663 — an annual celebration on the anniversary of his successful operation for kidney stones — featured “rabbets and chicken,” a boiled leg of mutton, roasted pigeons, “Lampry pie,” and a dish of anchovies, without a vegetable in sight. Roast beef was the proper food for Englishmen, thundered Robert Campbell in 1747, protesting the “Depraved Taste” of the French, who liked to gussy things up with sauces and salads. Even nutritionists admit that if we could take only one food to a desert island, we’d be better off packing hotdogs than Brussels sprouts.
Roast beef was the proper food for Englishmen, thundered Robert Campbell in 1747, protesting the “Depraved Taste” of the French, who liked to gussy things up with salads.
On the other hand, although meat eating has its nutritional advantages, vegetable eating traditionally has been considered far better for the good of the soul. Among the earliest proponents of vegetarianism was the eighth-century BCE Greek poet Hesiod, who preached, but probably did not practice, a rural diet of mallow and asphodel. He was followed, after a two-hundred-year lag, by Pythagoras, sometimes called the “Father of Vegetarianism,” who urged a meatless diet upon his disciples in the sixth century BCE. The “Pythagorean diet” — the going term for meatless meals until the word “vegetarianism” was invented in the mid-1800s — was intended to promote peace of mind and suppress distracting animal passions among budding philosophers.
In colonial America, one of the earliest vegetable advocates was Benjamin Franklin, who bravely experimented with a vegetarian diet in his youthful days as a Philadelphia printer, in company with Samuel Keimer, his employer. They tried it for three months, and Franklin later recalled: “I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffered grievously, tired of the project, long’d for the flesh-pots of Egypt, and order’d roast pig. He invited me and two women friends to dine with him; but, it being brought too soon upon the table, he could not resist the temptation and ate the whole before we came. . . .”
Franklin himself held on longer but finally fell off the wagon on a sea voyage from Boston. The boat became stranded off Block Island, vegetarian victuals were in short supply, and the hungry Franklin gave in to a meal of fried codfish.
Thomas Jefferson was a vegetable fan, explaining in a letter of 1819 that he ate “little animal food, and that not as an aliment, so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my ‘principle’ diet.” More common, however, was the experience of English visitor Frances Trollope, touring the United States in the 1830s, who commented in appalled tones on the unrelenting American diet of pork, salt fish, and cornbread.
In nineteenth-century America, foremost among vegetable proponents was the vociferous Sylvester Graham, whose name survives today in the graham cracker. Graham was born in 1794 in West Suffield, Connecticut, youngest child in a family of seventeen. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1826, but soon abandoned the cloth for the job of general agent with the Pennsylvania Society for the Suppression of Ardent Spirits, based in Philadelphia. During his tenure as temperance agent, Graham studied anatomy, physiology, and nutrition, and evolved the dietary theories that became the basis of the “Graham system.”
According to Graham, the “enormous wickedness and atrocious violence” preceding the Flood were the result of excessive meat eating. Similarly, indulgence in meats, fats, salt, spices, ketchup, mustard, and Demon Rum was drastically weakening the present American populace, leaving citizens open to crime, sexual sin, and mental and physical disease. The cholera epidemic of 1832 seemed to prove his point and the chastened public seized upon dietary reform.
Reform was no matter for wimps. The Graham system encompassed an unappetizing regimen of oatmeal porridge, beans, boiled rice, unbuttered whole-grain bread, and graham — originally Graham — crackers, plus cold baths, hard beds, open windows, and vigorous exercise. Despite opposition from physicians, raw vegetables and fruits were on Graham’s approved list, to be washed down with the recommended Graham drink: water.
Grahamite boardinghouses dedicated to this masochistic program — residents rose by a 5:00 AM bell — opened in New York City and Boston, and university students formed campus Graham clubs (by most accounts, small and short-lived). The trustees of the Albany Orphan Asylum adopted the Graham system for their charges, a move which, according to one source, “aroused great controversy in the periodical press.”
For all its ascetic peculiarities, Grahamism did effectively further the cause of garden-fresh vegetables in a notably vitamin-deficient society. Salad greens, tomatoes, radishes, cauliflowers, asparagus, green beans, and spinach began to appear on everyday tables, though often cooked to mush: Eliza Leslie, author of Directions for Miss Leslie’s Complete Cookery, in Its Various Branches (1840), the best-selling cookbook of the nineteenth century, recommends that peas and asparagus be boiled for at least an hour; green beans for an hour and a half; and carrots and beets for three.
Full-blown vegetarianism was embraced by some, including such celebrities as Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoy, and George Bernard Shaw, who abandoned meat at the age of twenty-five, announcing, “A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.” (Opponents of the idea included British journalist J. B. Morton, who wrote: “Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold, calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, and favor beards.”)
“Vegetarians have wicked, shifty eyes and laugh in a cold, calculating manner. They pinch little children, steal stamps, drink water, and favor beards.”
Also noticeably resistant to vegetables were athletes. Ancient Olympic runners ate onions and Roman gladiators dined on barley bread, but nineteenth-century sports competitors favored red meat and dark beer. From a pro-vegetable point of view, the meat/beer regimen was annoyingly successful. In 1809, British athletic champion Robert Barclay walked one thousand miles in one thousand successive hours, nourished on nothing but heaping plates of beef and mutton.
In a similarly telling episode of the 1860s, the Oxford rowing crew trained exclusively on beef, beer, bread, and tea, with an occasional suppertime helping of watercress, while the opposing Cambridge team ate unrestricted amounts of salad greens, potatoes, and fresh fruits. The years from 1861 to 1869 produced an unbroken succession of meat-fed Oxford victories. Fueled by such incidents, the red-meat mystique persisted well into the twentieth century, when nutritional research found high-carbohydrate meals like pasta and potatoes to be more efficient sources of rapid energy.
Americans today still aren’t eating enough of their vegetables. A 2009 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report showed that the average American eats 92 pounds of fresh vegetables a year — depressingly down from the 101 pounds we each ate in 1999 — and that only about a quarter of us eat more than three servings of fruits and veggies a day. (The recommended goal is five to eight.) Two-thirds of Americans are now either over-weight or obese, and 54 million of us suffer from prediabetes. The favorite vegetable of American toddlers, according to one recent study, is the French fry. In the words of the Joni Mitchell song, we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
In Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper, protagonist Miles Monroe, erstwhile owner of the Happy Carrot health-food store, is cryogenically frozen and wakes up two hundred years in the future, where he baffles a team of physicians by demanding wheat germ and organic honey for breakfast. In the twenty-second century, the definition of health food has been turned on its ear.
“Oh, yes,” says one doctor, chuckling knowledgeably, “those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.”
“You mean there was no deep fat?” replies his appalled colleague. “No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?”
An undisputed advantag
e of the garden is that it produces no cream pies. Instead it generates what activist Michael Pollan calls real food — stuff any alert hunter-gatherer would recognize as dinner — as opposed to processed food, which nowadays includes such commercial weirdities as DayGlo-orange cheese, cereal with lavender marshmallows, and fried chickenoid chunks in buckets.
Real food, Pollan points out, is not fast. Like all good things, it takes time: one way or another, it grows, and the closer we are to that process, the healthier and happier we’re likely to be.
“For all things produced in a garden, whether of salads or fruits, a poor man will eat better that has one of his own, than a rich man that has none,” wrote Scottish botanist John Loudon in The Encyclopedia of Gardening in 1822. Separated from her vegetable garden during her husband’s first presidential term, Martha Washington wrote home to Mount Vernon: “Impress it on the gardener to have everything in the garden that will be necessary in a house keeping way — as vegetables is the best part of our living in the country.”
Real food, Pollan points out, is not fast.
Of course there’s more to gardening than vegetables, and gardens have always fed far more than hungry stomachs. They also feed the soul. I’d be willing to bet that even those first staggered rows of Neolithic barley delighted their planters. It’s “a love that nobody could share or conceive of” who has “never taken part in the process of creation,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne of his Concord garden. “It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.” I know just what he means.
“It is not graceful, and it makes one hot,” wrote Elizabeth, Countess von Arnim, busily planting her German garden in the 1890s, “but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple.” In Barbara Cooney’s enchanting picture book Miss Rumphius, the redoubtable title character sets out to make the world more beautiful, and so she plants flowers.
