How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  From the first orange original, Dutch growers soon produced the even deeper-colored Long Orange, a hefty carrot intended for winter storage, and the smaller and sweeter Horn. The Horn was further fine-tuned to yield, by the mid-eighteenth century, three breeds of orange carrot varying in earliness and size: the Late Half Long, the Early Half Long, and the smaller Early Scarlet Horn. Collectively, these 200-year-old Dutch carrots are the direct ancestors of all orange carrots grown today.

  Carrots owe their orange to carotenoids, a collection of some five-hundred-odd yellow and orange pigments that function in plants to protect the all-important green chlorophyll from sun damage. About 10 percent of carotenoids are also vitamin A precursors, and beta-carotene — the most prominent carotenoid in carrots — is one of these. In the human digestive tract, beta-carotene is clipped in half by a helpful enzyme to form two molecules of vitamin A, also known as retinol.

  No matter what your grandma told you, carrots won’t give you full-fledged nocturnal vision, any more than bread crusts will make your hair curl.

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  Raw or Stewed?

  A single orange carrot provides the average adult with more than his or her recommended daily allotment of vitamin A. In terms of beta-carotene, however, the carrot cooked is far more forthcoming than the carrot raw. Crunched down à la Bugs Bunny, raw carrots release only about 3 percent of their total beta-carotene to the human digestive system. In boiled carrots, where the cooking acts to break down the root’s thick cell walls, up to 40 percent is released; and blended or juiced carrots release up to 90 percent.

  * * *

  Vitamin A plays a number of essential roles in the human body, among them the support of cell growth and reproduction and the regulation of the immune system — but it is perhaps best known for its effect on eyesight. In the retina of the eye, vitamin A binds to a protein (opsin) in the rod cells to form the visual pigment rhodopsin, which allows us to see — more or less — in the dark. In fact, the first hint of vitamin A deficiency is impaired dark adaptation (“night blindness”), and a severe or prolonged lack of vitamin A can lead to permanent blindness.

  No matter what your grandma told you, however, carrots won’t give you full-fledged nocturnal vision, any more than bread crusts will make your hair curl. The carrot-based night vision hype can be traced to the Battle of Britain in World War II, when Britain’s newly installed radar network, which effectively tracked incoming German bombers, began to give a distinct advantage to the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force.

  During World War II, innovative home front housewives produced carrot toffee, carrot marmalade, carrot fudge, and a drink called Carrolade made from crushed carrots and rutabagas.

  Legendary pilot John Cunningham, nicknamed “Cat’s Eyes” for his reputed ability to see in the dark, was the first person to shoot down an enemy plane with the aid of radar, and he soon went on to chalk up an impressive record of kills. The RAF, in an attempt to distract German attention from the bristling radar towers along the British coast, spread the story that Cunningham and his fellow night-flying pilots owed their success to a prodigious diet of vision-enhancing carrots. It’s not clear how the carrot con went down with the German high command, but the British civilian population swallowed it, in the belief that eating carrots would help them navigate in the blackout.

  Although carrots can’t give you bona-fide night vision, they can, if you eat enough of them, turn you yellow. This syndrome, known clinically as carotenemia or carotenosis, results from the deposition of carotene pigments in the subcutaneous fat, just beneath the skin. Though visually somewhat startling, carotenemia seems to be physically harmless and disappears within a few weeks if the victim lays off carrots.

  Carotene also gives cream its rich yellowish hue. In the seventeenth century, cows fed on the champion Dutch carrots were said to yield the richest milk and the yellowest butter in Europe, which in turn was held to be responsible for the famous rosy-cheeked Dutch complexion. Butter makers in colonial America, starting with less well-fed cows, often colored their butter after the fact by adding carrot juice to the churn.

  As well as beta-carotene, carrots are also high in minerals, notably potassium, calcium, and phosphorus. In 2008, Kendal Hirschi and his team at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas created a genetically engineered high-calcium “super carrot,” capable of delivering to the eater over 40 percent more calcium than the ordinary carrot. Super carrots may eventually help stave off such conditions as brittle bone disease and osteoporosis.

  Carrots also contain a lot of sugar. A single 7½-inch carrot contains some seven grams of carbohydrate, most of it — as in honey — in the form of fructose and glucose. Carrot carbs were made much of by the British Ministry of Food during World War II, when sugar was essentially unobtainable. The Ministry’s “War Cookery Leaflet 4,” devoted to the preparation of carrots, included recipes for carrot pudding, carrot cake, and carrot flan. Under the urging of the government’s vegetable-promoting “Dr. Carrot,” a gigantic carrot tricked out in a lab coat and top hat, innovative home front housewives produced carrot toffee, carrot marmalade, carrot fudge, and a drink called Carrolade, made from crushed carrots and rutabagas.

  Because of their lip-smacking sweetness, carrots historically have been used in desserts. A recipe for carrot conserve — a sweet jam — survives in the fourteenth-century Menagier de Paris. The conserve, whose carrots are referred to as “red roots,” also contains green walnuts, mustard, horseradish, spices, and honey. John Evelyn’s 1699 Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets contains a recipe for a distinctly unsaladlike carrot pudding, a luscious-sounding mix of cream, butter, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and grated carrot. The Irish, who doubtless found carrots a welcome relief from a relentless diet of potatoes, called them “underground honey.”

  Even sweeter than the carrot is the related parsnip, Pastinaca sativa, which Ogden Nash, not a parsnip lover, compared damp-ingly to an anemic beet. Historically, it fared better: cheap, sugary, and substantial, the parsnip was a prime entrée in the Middle Ages, especially during the lean days of Lent.

  The parsnip, like the bustle, began to fall from favor in the nineteenth century when, along with the Jerusalem artichoke, it was ousted from gardens by the more versatile Irish potato. Pre-potato, however, it was a garden staple: the rich ate parsnips in cream sauce and the poor ate them in pottage. John Gerard and Sir Francis Bacon both put in a good word for them; and Sir Walter Scott wrote sardonically that fine words don’t butter any parsnips, meaning that flattery is worth diddly-squat.

  Most parsnips are long, pale, funnel-shaped roots, a sort of oversized khaki-colored carrot. (Round turniplike varieties, introduced to the United States in 1834, never really caught on.) The large meaty types known as hollow-crown parsnips were developed in the Middle Ages; still grown today, these have a saucer-shaped depression at the top of the root (the “hollow crown”) from which sprout the stems and leaves. Parsnips contain, root for root, about twice as much sugar as carrots, most in the form of sucrose, the sugar of sugarcane.

  Aunt Hannah, having passed through port and rum, hit the parsnip wine, which led her to sing “a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest.”

  Historically, the sugary parsnip has been boiled down into syrup and marmalade and, with the help of a little yeast, brewed into beer and wine. One early nineteenth-century source directs hopeful winemakers to boil twelve pounds of sliced parsnips, strain through a sieve, add loaf sugar and yeast, and then age for twelve months. Modern winemakers, however, according to biologist (and parsnip fan) Roger Swain, opt for aging up to ten years, and a lot of wine connoisseurs suggest never, under any circumstances, taking the stuff out of the cask.

  Drunk, however, it seems to be effective: in A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Dylan Thomas’s susceptible Aunt Hannah, having passed through port and rum, hit the parsnip wine, which led her to sing “a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then
another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest.”

  The sweeter the parsnip, the more efficient the fermentation process — which means that winemakers should harvest their parsnips in the spring. Many plants, including parsnips, cabbages, and potatoes, sweeten after exposure to temperatures below 50 degrees F (10 degrees C). As early as the first century CE, Pliny the Elder commented on the phenomenon: “Turnips are believed to grow sweeter and bigger in cold weather,” and “With any kind of cabbage, hoarfrosts contribute a great deal to their sweetness.”

  Low-temperature sweetening occurs in leaves, shoots, and roots of responsive plants. The sugar content of cabbages doubles after thirty days in the cold; overwintered parsnips contain nearly three times more sucrose by weight than their autumn-harvested buddies.

  No satisfactory explanation yet exists for this sweetening process. One hypothesis suggests that the increased sugar acts as a cryoprotectant, a species of natural antifreeze. A similar explanation has been advanced to account for the increased spring sugar content of some tree saps, like that of the syrup-generating sugar maple.

  Carrots and parsnips are biennials. The starches and sugars of the fat storage roots are meant to support the development of flowers and seeds in the second year of growth. Permitted to progress to year two, carrots produce lacy compound umbels on two- to six-foot stalks, similar to the flowers of Queen Anne’s lace. The largest flower, which ripens first, is called the king umbel, followed by a lesser array of side umbels, from all of which develop carrot seeds.

  The edible taproot, for which gardeners routinely forfeit the aesthetic delights of carrot flowers, consists of a central core of vascular tissue and an outer layer called the cortex, composed of storage tissue. In the carrot, as increasing amounts of starch are accumulated, the central core pushes outward, maintaining a two-part pattern, which is why the carrot in cross-section looks like a slice of hard-boiled egg. In the beet, in contrast, vascular and storage tissue are laid down in alternate rings, like those of a tree trunk, while in the radish and turnip, vascular and storage cells are indistinguishably intermixed.

  Queen Anne, the story goes, challenged her ladies-in-waiting to make a piece of lace as fine as the flower of the wild carrot.

  The taproots of today’s garden carrots average five to eight inches long. These are weenie by ancestral standards. Nineteenth-century growers boasted of two-foot roots, a foot or more in circumference at the thickest, and weighing up to four pounds. Amelia Simmons, in her 1796 American Cookery, after a discussion of the superiority of the yellow carrot over the orange and the red, advises the “middling sized” carrot for cooking, by which she means a hefty vegetable a foot long and two inches across at the top. She recommends it as an accompaniment for veal, though it is also “rich in soups” and “excellent with hash.” Carrots in Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife (1824) require three hours of boiling, which implies a vegetable of substantial size.

  The carrot arrived in North America with the first settlers. The Jamestownians planted them between tobacco crops; and John Winthrop, Jr., included “Carrets” on his seed list of 1631. Carrots figured in the earliest of American seed advertisements: in 1738, one John Little offered orange carrots for sale along with his other “new garden seeds”; in 1748, “Richard Francis, Gardner, living at the sign of the black and white Harre at the South end of Boston” offered the gardening public carrots in a choice of orange or yellow. Jefferson grew carrots in several colors at Monticello.

  From all of these widespread colonial gardens, the carrot promptly escaped and reverted to the wild. The ubiquitous American Queen Anne’s lace of fields and country roadsides descends from ex-cultivated escapees.

  The Queen of these lacy flowers is said to be Anne of Denmark, wife of England’s James I and an expert needle-woman. Queen Anne, the story goes, in an attempt to alleviate the mind-crushing boredom of court living, challenged her ladies-in-waiting to make a piece of lace as fine as the flower of the wild carrot. The Queen herself, not surprisingly, won hands down, and the flower was rechristened in her name. Less romantically, it is known as bird’s nest or devil’s plague.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, the 1870s were a banner decade for carrots, ushering in both the Danvers carrot, a dark orange, medium-long variety with exceptionally high yields, developed in Danvers, Massachusetts, and the Nantes carrot, named for its town of origin in France. Burpee’s 1888 Farm Annual neglected the Nantes in favor of the equally French Chantenay (“of more than usual merit”) and Guerande (“of very fine quality”) — but reserved special praise for the homegrown Danvers, variously described as “handsome” and “first-class.” Also offered by Burpee were the Early Scarlet Horn and the related Golden Ball, a stumpy little vegetable that looked less like a carrot than a deep-yellow radish.

  French seedsmen Vilmorin-Andrieux, in The Vegetable Garden (1885), diplomatically mention both the Danvers and the Nantes varieties along with some twenty-three other carrots, in a range of shapes and sizes. Impressive among them is the English Altringham carrot, whose bronze or violet roots measured over twenty inches long.

  Garden carrots today generally belong to one of four major types: Imperator, Danvers, Nantes, or Chantenay. In general, Imperator and Danvers carrots are long and pointed; Nantes and Chantenay carrots, shorter and blunt; but the vast number of carrot cultivars available today tend to blur distinctions. Most carrot eaters agree that Nantes and Chantenay types are best for eating raw, while Danvers types — known for “broad shoulders” — are best for slicing and popping in stew.

  It’s safe to say, however, that there’s a carrot out there for everybody. In fact, the online World Carrot Museum, an extraordinary collection of all things carrot, includes a list of common carrot varieties that includes at least one for (almost) every letter of the alphabet, from the New Zealand Akaroa to the (good for juicing) Zino.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In Which

  CELERY

  CONTRIBUTES

  TO

  CASANOVA’S

  CONQUESTS

  plus

  Mrs. Astor’s Dinner Table, Besotted Bees,

  A Trimming for Tombs, Boar Sauce,

  John Evelyn’s Unfinished Masterpiece,

  and Airborne Magicians

  Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  Celery tonic is still around. Nowadays it’s called Cel-Ray and is made by Canada Dry, but it’s still basically the same brew — soda water flavored with crushed celery seeds — that went on the market in Brooklyn in 1868 as Dr. Brown’s Celery Tonic. It’s not clear that there ever actually was a Dr. Brown — the name may simply have been invented for customer appeal, like General Mills’s housewifely but nonexistent Betty Crocker. Real or no, however, he was at the forefront of the nineteenth-century celery craze, an enthusiasm that eventually produced not only celery soda, but also celery gum, celery soup, and Elixir of Celery, touted as a treatment for nervous ailments and popular enough to be offered in the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalog.

  In the Gilded Age, celery was also in vogue on the posh tables of the rich, whose meals, served by footmen, lasted more than two hours and involved twenty-four pieces of silverware and six wine-glasses per place setting. Celery, in the heyday of the Astors and Vanderbilts, was served — not in little flat dishes with the olives, as on everybody’s grandmother’s dinner table — but in towering glass or silver celery vases, such that the leafy tops loomed impressively over the gravy boats, soup tureens, epergnes, and fancy floral centerpieces. Celery, once upon a time, was a fashion statement. It was pricey, and if you had it, you wanted to show it off.

  The high cost of celery, which put it well out of the range of the average pocketbook, was due to its labor-intensive mode of cultivation. Nineteenth-century celery was routinely blanched, a whitening and sweetening process that involved piling dirt around the developing stalks to block exposure to sunlight. With the introduction of self-blanching v
arieties — Burpee’s Golden Self Blanching Celery came on the market in 1884 — celery rapidly became more affordable. It was soon immensely popular across the social board; a late-nineteenth-century French tourist peevishly wrote that the celery-obsessed Americans “almost incessantly nibble” from the beginning to the end of their repasts. Inevitably, as celery entered the common clutches, it lost its prestige, and by the end of the century had been demoted from the boastful vase to the aforementioned unobtrusive flat dish.

  The subject of all this social heartburn is a member of the family Apiaceae (along with the related carrots, parsnips, parsley, caraway, coriander, dill, and fennel). Its scientific name, Apius graveolens, derives from the Latin apis, or “bee,” because bees go dotty over its tiny fragrant white flowers. Modern edible celery is believed to have originated in the Mediterranean area and Eurasia, where, in wild form, it established itself in the marsh-lands adjacent to the seacoast. Wild celery is colloquially known as smallage, derived from an older term for celery — ache (pronounced “ash”) — which evolved into the Old English small-ache. More strongly flavored than cultivated celery, smallage today is the source of culinary celery seed.

  In ancient times celery was prized as a pharmaceutical, and one linguistic theory holds that its common name derives from its remedial reputation — from the Latin celer, meaning quick-acting or swift, as in celerity and acceleration. Medically, celery has a long and versatile history. The Egyptians used celery stalks to treat impotence; the Romans used them to treat constipation and wore the leafy tops to alleviate hangovers. Apicius, who doubtless suffered many in the course of his expensively decadent career, recommended that morning-after victims “wear a wreath of celery round the brow to ease the pain.” Pliny recommends celery (or parsley) as a treatment for lumbago; and reports that celery (or parsley), tossed in a fish pond, revives sickly fish.