How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  As well as mustard oils, members of the cabbage family contain goitrins, capable of blocking iodine uptake by the thyroid gland, and antivitamins, which bind to or mimic the real McCoys, preventing their uptake by the body. Neither is present in particularly threatening concentrations in the cultivated cabbage plant, which has been defused by centuries of human selection. Wild cabbages, however, can contain up to four times the amount of the milquetoast house-and-garden cabbage varieties.

  While the nineteenth-century cabbage was most commonly subjected by the poor and vulgar to prolonged boiling, the cabbage-fancying Pennsylvania Germans turned theirs into sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is an ancient food tradition: the laborers who built the 1,500-mile-long Great Wall of China were nourished on rice and cabbage pickled in wine. Centuries later, Genghis Khan’s cohorts added salt and took the portable result along on their invasion of eastern Europe. The concoction, adopted by the invadees, outlasted the Mongol hordes.

  Rich in vitamin C, sauerkraut was carried as an antiscorbutic on early sea voyages. The British navy gave it a try before latching onto limes, and found it a success. Captain James Cook, on his second voyage on the Resolution from 1772 to 1775 — during which he circumnavigated New Zealand and just missed Antarctica — fed his men on fermented cabbage, noting in his log:

  “Sour Krout, of which we had also a large provision, is not only a wholesome vegetable food, but, in my judgement, highly antiscorbutic; and spoils not by keeping. A pound of it was served to each man, when at sea, twice a week, or oftener when it was thought necessary . . . These, Sire, were the methods, under the care of Providence, by which the Resolution performed a voyage of three years and eighteen days, through all the climates from 52 degrees North to 71 degrees South, with the loss of one man only by disease, and who died of a complicated and lingering illness, without any mixture of scurvy.”

  Sauerkraut was claimed (by royalty-courting Pennsylvanians) to have been a favorite food of Charlemagne, and President James Buchanan, a Lancaster boy, was famed for the sauerkraut suppers served at Wheatlands, his Pennsylvania estate. During World War I, nobody gave it up, but ate it under the patriotic sobriquet “Liberty Cabbage.” To this day, in Maryland, sauerkraut is a standard accompaniment to the all-American Thanksgiving turkey.

  Garden broccoli, B. oleracea var. italica, was loved by the Romans. The common name is derived from the Latin bracchium, meaning branch, although Roman growers themselves referred to the plant poetically as “the five green fingers of Jupiter.” Drusus, oldest son and heir of the Emperor Tiberius, is said to have been positively addicted to it. One story holds that the broccoli-besotted prince once refused to eat anything else for an entire month, at which point his urine turned a bright broccoli green. His annoyed father upbraided him for “living precariously” and ordered him to cease and desist.

  * * *

  A Bolt of Broccoli

  There’s a kind of lightning that looks like broccoli. Discovered in 1989 when physicist John Winckler and colleagues at the University of Minnesota inadvertently captured it on video, this breed of bolt, rather than heading earthward, shoots upward into the stratosphere, forming eerie pink-and-blue electrical apparitions towering 30 miles or more above the tops of thunderclouds. Winckler dubbed these “sprites” after the flighty fairies of Prospero’s enchanted island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Like fairies, they’re elusive, lasting barely a millisecond — less than the time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings. Some viewers compare them to jellyfish, but any meteorologist with a garden will see a resemblance to broccoli.

  * * *

  Broccoli was introduced to France in the mid-1500s — some credit the bevy of creative Italian cooks who arrived with Catherine de Medici — and soon after made its way across the Channel to England, where it appeared on Elizabethan menus as “Brawcle.” Phillip Miller mentioned it as “Italian asparagus” in his Gardener’s Dictionary (1731), and Virginian John Randolph described it in 1765 in his anonymously published Treatise on Gardening. “The stems will eat like Asparagus,” said Randolph, “and the heads like Cauliflower.”

  Although it sounded yummy, broccoli didn’t truly catch on in the United States until the 1930s — and even then it met pockets of suspicious resistance. President George W. Bush dug in his heels on broccoli, famously announcing, “I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m the President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.”

  A well-known New Yorker cartoon of the early broccoli period, captioned by E. B. White, shows a vegetable-proffering mother and an uncooperative child:

  “It’s broccoli, dear.”

  “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”

  Kids these days seem more accepting of broccoli. It’s not at the top of the juvenile list — favorite childhood vegetables are carrots and potatoes — but it’s not at the bottom either. Nearly 60 percent of kids like it, which puts it well up on green beans, spinach, asparagus, and eggplant.

  Both broccoli and cauliflower are edible modifications of the cabbage flower. Botanists hypothesize that one of these is an early developmental form of the other, though considerable chicken-or-egg-like confusion exists over which came first. The edible portions of the broccoli plant include both fleshy stalks and clustered flower buds. These buds, left to themselves, will eventually open — hence “sprouting broccoli” — while the cauliflower head, a degenerate and sterile inflorescence, lacks this ability and, like Peter Pan, florally speaking, never grows up. To some scientists this suggests that broccoli appeared on the scene first. Today most broccolis are green, but common nineteenth-century garden varieties were more colorful, in purples, browns, reds, and creams.

  Cauliflower, B. oleracea var. botrytis, was somewhat better accepted by the public, though it was censured by Mark Twain as “nothing but a cabbage with a college education.” This most intellectual of cabbages is a precocious annual, whose edible buds, in lieu of opening, solidify into a tightly packed head technically called a curd. An early description of the cauliflower — at least, it might be cauliflower — dates to the twelfth century, when an Arab botanist spoke of a “flowering Syrian cabbage.” It was mentioned by John Gerard as “Cole flowery,” and commented upon in seventeenth-century French documents as “chou-fleur.” In Spain, according to Bert Greene, cauliflowers were grown ornamentally and it was customary for young women to wear small samples titillatingly tucked in their cleavages.

  “Of all the flowers in the garden,” announced Samuel Johnson, the way to whose heart was through the stomach, “I like the cauliflower best.”

  More commonly, however, the cauliflower was eaten — raw, boiled, or pickled — and by the eighteenth century, in any one of these manifestations, it was a highly regarded addition to the dinner table. “Of all the flowers in the garden,” announced Samuel Johnson, the way to whose heart was through the stomach, “I like the cauliflower best.” In France, the cauliflower was popularly eaten in soup — at court as the delectable Crème du Barry, a cream-of-cauliflower soup named for the equally delectable mistress of Louis XV.

  Nowadays most cauliflower cultivars are white or cream-colored — the curds were once routinely blanched by wrapping them in the outer leaves to prevent unwanted discoloring by chlorophyll-inducing sunshine. Eighteenth-century gardeners also grew red and purple cauliflowers, which seem to have gone out of fashion by the late 1800s. Burpee’s 1888 Farm Annual offers eleven cauliflower cultivars, all white.

  The latest of the versatile cabbages is Brussels sprouts, B. oleracea var. gemmifera, which serendipitously burst upon the garden scene in mid-eighteenth-century Belgium. Earlier possible descriptions exist: some sources hold that the Romans had Brussels sprouts, known as bullata gemmifera or diamond-makers, from their putative ability to enhance mental prowess. (Mark Antony is said to have eaten them, without effect, before being trounced by Augustus Caesar at the Battle of Actium.) Others suggest that the Roman reference
s actually describe a tiny form of heading cabbage. In fact, the sprouts are axillary buds, compact miniature cabbage heads sprouting from the stalk, which is topped by a rosette of large loose leaves. From these multiple buds comes the nickname “thousand-headed cabbage.”

  When it comes to the multitudinous cabbages, we eat leaves, stems, buds, flowers, and roots — all but the fruit. The cabbage fruit, called a silique or siliqua, is a dry and unappetizing seed capsule — seldom seen in the garden, since most cabbages are picked and cooked before they have a chance to produce any. The cabbage-related Lunaria annua, however — variously known as “honesty,” “money plant,” and “moonwort” — is grown for its lovely translucent siliques, which resemble flat silvery coins.

  Also prized for siliques is Arabidopsis thaliana or thale cress, a nondescript-looking cabbage cousin native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa that goes from seed to sprout to flower to seed-stuffed silique in a mere six weeks. With its tiny genome — just five chromosomes — and (for a plant) its lightninglike growth rate, Arabidopsis has established itself as a model organism for studies of plant genetics, development, and evolution. Plant scientists describe it as the greenhouse equivalent of those other boons to biology, the mouse and the fruit fly.

  The modern cabbage is also a candidate for a future life in space. NASA’s Contained Environmental Life Support System (CELSS) program, established in the 1980s, analyzes food-plant production in sealed spaces, of the sort likely to be available on future space stations and colonies. So far, lettuce, spinach, strawberries, chives, and potatoes are high on the extraplanetary list. Researchers are testing a wide array of additional crop and garden species, including tomatoes, corn, sorghum, rice, wheat, peanuts, radishes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, and cabbages.

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  Bach’s Classical Cabbage

  German composer Johann Sebastian Bach drank brandy and beer (we know this from surviving bar bills), and he almost certainly ate cabbage, turnips, and potatoes. His music, however, suggests that he may have preferred sausage and sauerbraten. Variation 30 of his famous Goldberg Variations is based on an old German folksong, “Kraut und Rüben,” which begins “Cabbage and turnips have driven me away/Had my mother cooked meat, I’d have opted to stay.”

  * * *

  One story, on the other hand, holds that cabbages have already headed off to explore new worlds on their own. An old tale from northern Germany claims that the man in the moon is a larcenous peasant who sneaked out to cut cabbages from his neighbor’s garden on Christmas Eve. Caught in the act by the passing Christ Child, he was sent to the moon as punishment for his sin. There he still sits, cabbages and all.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  In Which

  CARROTS

  WIN

  THE TROJAN WAR

  plus

  A Badly Behaved Rabbit,

  Henry Ford’s Food Fetish, A Dose of

  Devil’s Porridge, The Amazing Career

  of Cat’s-Eyes Cunningham, and

  A Royal Embroidery Contest

  Large, naked raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who lie in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.

  FRAN LEBOWITZ

  Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, certainly the most famous rabbit in literature, didn’t eat carrots. No, really. He didn’t. Once he wiggled under Mr. MacGregor’s garden fence, he gorged on lettuces, French beans, and radishes, and then, feeling sick, he went off in search of parsley. At that point he rounded a cucumber frame, encountered the justifiably enraged Mr. MacGregor, and spent most of the rest of the book running. That evening, still without a carrot in sight, his well-behaved siblings, Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, got blackberries and milk for supper, while the reprehensible Peter was put sternly to bed with a dose of chamomile tea.

  Rabbits will eat carrots but, frankly, carrots don’t seem to be all that high on the rabbit food list. Their preferred vegetables are peas, beans, and beets, and if you grow any or all of these, the only way to keep rabbits from munching up the lot is to put a two-foot fence around your garden. Alternatively you can sprinkle the perimeter with dried blood or fox urine — or you can get a ferret. Not that these are guarantees. Rabbits are pushy, persistent, and tough.

  People, on the other hand, not only eat carrots, but apparently adore them. Each of us consumes about twelve pounds of carrots a year (up from a mere four annual pounds in 1975); and kids, who turn up their noses at squash and spinach, routinely list carrots among their vegetable favorites. Historically, foremost among American carrot fans was industrialist Henry Ford, whose passion for vegetables was perhaps second only to his fondness for the automobile.

  Ford was anti-milk (“the cow is the crudest machine in the world”) and anti-meat (he promoted soybeans in lieu of beef and oatmeal crackers as a substitute for chicken), but he was devoted to the carrot which, he was convinced, held the secret to longevity. At one point he was the guest of honor at a twelve-course all-carrot dinner, which began with carrot soup and continued through carrot mousse, carrot salad, pickled carrots, carrots au gratin, carrot loaf, and carrot ice cream, all accompanied by glass after glass of carrot juice.

  One story holds that Ford became interested in the painter Titian when his son Edsel donated a Titian painting (“Judith and the Head of Holofernes”) to the Detroit Institute of Arts. It wasn’t the artist’s work that interested him; it was the fact that Titian had reportedly lived to be ninety-nine. He wanted to know if Titian ate carrots.

  The first carrots, botanists believe, came from Afghanistan and were purple. Scrawny, highly branched, and unpromising, these wine-colored roots belonged, like their plump cultivated descendants, to the Apiaceae family, some 300 genera and 3,000 species of aromatic plants commonly known as umbellifers. As well as the crunchy carrot (Daucus carota), the Apiaceae include celery, parsnips, anise, caraway, chervil, cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, lovage, parsley, and poison hemlock — this last, known in Ireland as “Devil’s porridge,” an infusion of which killed Socrates. Characteristically, the umbellifers have hollow stems: Yann Lovelock in The Vegetable Book (1972) describes how the stalks of wild parsnip were once used as straws for sipping cider and weapons for shooting peas.

  The ancestral carrot probably looked very much like Queen Anne’s lace, the ubiquitous wild carrot of present-day fields and roadsides. The cultivated Greek and Roman carrots were probably still branched — a witchy characteristic referred to by modern breeders as “a high degree of ramification” — but were most likely larger, fleshier, and less bitter than their wild relatives. Experiments in the late nineteenth century by French seedsman Henri Vilmorin demonstrated the relative ease with which primitive farmers could have developed the cultivated carrot. Starting with a spindly-rooted wild species, Vilmorin was able to obtain thick-rooted equivalents of the garden carrot in a mere three years.

  The conical root shape characteristic of carrots today seems to have shown up in the tenth or eleventh century in Asia Minor, and may have reached Europe in the twelfth century by way of Moorish Spain. No one, however, seems to have rushed to adopt it: John Gerard, in the sixteenth century, remarks that as nourishment goes, the carrot is “not verie good,” although botanist John Parkinson, author of Paradisus in Sole Paradisus Terrestris (1629), who seems to have liked it better, says it can be “eaten with great pleasure” if boiled in beef broth. The roots, he added, are “round and long, thicke above and small below,” and come in either red or yellow, while the dark green foliage, in autumn, turns red or purple, “the beautie whereof allureth many Gentlewomen oftentimes to gather the leaves and stick them in their hats or heads, or pin them on their arms instead of feathers.”

  The emperor Caligula, who had a fun-loving streak, once fed the entire Roman Senate a feast of carrots in hopes of watching them run sexually amok.

  * * *

  Carrot Clarinets and Pumpkin Drums

  The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra consists of a group of eleven musicians whose concerts around the world are pe
rformed on instruments made of fresh vegetables, such as carrot flutes, recorders, and clarinets; pumpkin drums; and leek violins.

  * * *

  The primitive purple, violet, red, and black carrots owed their color to anthocyanin, a pigment that dominated the carrot world until approximately the sixteenth century, when a pale yellow anthocyanin-less mutation appeared in western Europe. It thus must have been an anthocyanin-laced purplish carrot that Agamemnon’s soldiers legendarily munched (presumably quietly) inside the Trojan Horse “to bind their bowels,” and that Greeks on the home front used to concoct an aphrodisiacal potion or philtron. Like any vegetable even vaguely resembling a penis, the carrot was thought to be a passion promoter. Devious Roman soldiers boiled carrots in broth to release the sexual inhibitions of their female captives, and the emperor Caligula, who had a fun-loving streak, once fed the entire Roman Senate a feast of carrots in hopes of watching them run sexually amok.

  The purple carrot quickly fell from favor with the advent of the yellow and, later, orange varieties. The cultivated purples, though tasty, turned an unappetizing muddy brown when cooked, which put off even the most stolid of chefs. The aesthetically appealing orange carrot is said to be a late-sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century development of the Dutch, who were the dominant European carrot breeders. Some evidence for this comes from the sudden appearance of orange carrots in period oil paintings: Dutch painter Joachim Wtewael’s “Kitchen Scene” (1605), for example, a detailed portrayal of a crowded and active kitchen complete with kids, dogs, cats, and a flirtation going on in the corner, features a large bunch of orange carrots sprawled, dead center, on the floor.