How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  The medicinal cucumber dates to ancient times. Surprisingly, despite its phallic shape and size, the cucumber is one of the few vegetables in the Greek pharmacopoeia that is not an aphrodisiac. Sixteenth-century German herbalist Leonhart Fuchs quotes the Greek proverb “Let a woman weaving a cloak eat a cucumber,” adding that “female weavers, if we believe Aristotle, are unchaste and eager for lovemaking. So to restrain and weaken their urge, the adage advises women weavers to eat cucumbers.”

  Sleeping on a bed of cucumbers was said to alleviate fever — hence the saying “cool as a cucumber”; cucumber leaves stamped in wine were said to be effective for treating dog bites; and women wishing for children were encouraged to wear a cucumber suggestively suspended from the waist. To dream of cucumbers was believed to indicate the imminence of falling in love. The Romans claimed that cucumbers scared away mice, and John Gerard claimed that cucumbers, eaten three times a day in oatmeal pottage, could cure swellings of the face, noses “red as roses,” pimples, “pumples,” and like disasters of the seventeenth-century complexion.

  The horticultural cucumber was subject to an equal array of arcane beliefs. Cucumbers were said to be frightened of thunderstorms, so one expert gardener advised draping the plants in comforting “thin Coverlets” in the event of violently inclement weather. Estienne and Liébault, of the “hurtfull” cucumbers, claimed that cucumber seed more than three years old would yield (presumably nonhurtful) radishes when planted; but since they also suggested crushing flat parsley with a garden roller to make it curly, their advice should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt.

  A number of growers who should have known better claimed that cucumbers waxed and waned along with the moon. It was customary to pick cucumbers at the full of the moon, in hopes of getting the very biggest, which were also considered the very best. Garden designer Batty Langley objected to this practice in his New Principles of Gardening (1728):

  “‘Tis a very great Custom amongst a great many People to make choice of the very largest Cucumbers, believing them to be the best, which are not, but instead thereof, are the very worst, except such as are quite yellow. Therefore in the Choice of Cucumbers, I recommend those that are about three Parts grown, or hardly so much, before those very large ones, whose Seed are generally large, and not fit to be eaten, excepting by such Persons whose stomachs are very hot.”

  The vitriolic Dr. Samuel Johnson objected to all cucumbers, of whatever size, saying “A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.” It’s possible that he may have changed his mind given a chance at cucumbers prepared à la Elizabeth Rafald, who in The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769) recommended that large-sized cucumbers be stuffed with partly cooked pigeons, cleaned, but with heads and feathers left on, so that the heads appeared attached to the cucumber. These were cooked in broth and served garnished with barberries.

  General Ulysses S. Grant, who had simpler tastes, loved cucumbers, and often made an entire meal on sliced cucumbers and a cup of coffee. Eliza Leslie includes two cucumber recipes in her Directions for Cookery (1840), one for raw cucumbers in vinegar and oil, and one for cucumbers sliced, sprinkled in flour, and fried in butter, which she recommends as a breakfast dish.

  Cucumbers journeyed to the Western Hemisphere with Columbus, who planted them in his experimental garden on Haiti in 1494. They seem to have done well. By 1535, Jacques Cartier observed “very great cucumbers” in Canada near Montreal, and Hernando de Soto found “cucumbers better than those of Spain” in Florida in 1539. The colonists planted them, and by 1806 seedsman Bernard M’Mahon, author of the comprehensive Gardener’s Calendar, listed eight standard varieties in American gardens, including the impressive Long Green Turkey, twenty inches long at maturity.

  Also grown in American gardens, according to M’Mahon, was the West Indian gherkin, Cucumis anguria, nicknamed the Jerusalem pickle. C. anguria was described in an eighteenth-century natural history of Jamaica as a walnut-sized pale green fruit, “far inferior” to the garden cucumber, but edible if soaked in vinegar. This fazed the American colonists not at all since, in the absence of alternative preservation techniques, it was standard practice to pickle practically everything, from walnuts and peaches to artichokes and eggs.

  Amelia Simmons advised pickling cucumbers in white wine vinegar, with added cloves, mace, nutmeg, white peppercorns, “long pepper,” and ginger. Harriott Pinckney Horry’s 1770 Recipt Book has a similar recipe, “To Mango Muskmellons and Cucumbers and to pickle French Beans, firkins, etc.,” also said good, with a little adaptation, for oranges.

  Preservation by pickling works by immersing the food in an acid solution — most commonly vinegar — which prevents the growth of microorganisms and accompanying food spoilage. Vinegar is an invention of unspecified but considerable antiquity. The Babylonians made it from dates, the ancient Chinese from rice and barley, and the Spartans used it in their notorious black broth, a mix of pork stock, vinegar, and salt that sounds a bit like hot-and-sour soup. Apparently it wasn’t. According to the Athenians, consumption of it explained the Spartans’ legendary bravery in battle: black broth was so awful that anyone compelled to eat it was willing to die.

  Everybody loved pickles. Pickles even prodded the ordinarily scientific Thomas Jefferson into poetry: “On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally’s cellar.” Benjamin Franklin recommended pickles for “squeamish stomachs”; Cleopatra attributed her beauty to pickles; and Amerigo Vespucci — our nation’s namesake — started life as a pickle seller.

  * * *

  Sour Wine

  Our word vinegar is derived from the French vin aigre, or “sour wine,” reflecting its first major European source, as a by-product of the wine-making industry. Wine goes sour under the ministrations of a bacterium called Acetobacter, which consumes the existing alcohol, leaving behind a mixture of 4 percent acetic acid in water. A similar bacterial process sours beer to yield malt vinegar, and apple juice to yield the American specialty, cider vinegar. In the absence of any kind of vinegar, frontier families pickled their produce in the ever-available corn whiskey.

  * * *

  Pickles were endlessly popular in the nineteenth century, often the only taste relief in a monotonous diet of meat and potatoes. “A dinner or lunch without pickles of some kind is incomplete,” stated Good Housekeeping magazine in 1884. Today more than half the cucumbers grown in the United States are made into pickles, and Americans consume an annual nine pounds of pickles apiece — a national 26 billion pickles per year.

  The most famous pickle in American history is almost certainly the signature pickle of Pittsburgh’s Henry J. Heinz. Heinz’s biography is the quintessential Horatio Alger story: by the age of eight, Henry was selling surplus vegetables from the family garden; by twelve, he’d gone commercial, with his own 3½-acre plot of land. By the 1860s, he was selling bottled horseradish; in the 1870s, he started bottling pickles; and in 1876 — a landmark year for Heinz — he introduced the tomato ketchup that made both his fortune and his name.

  By 1888, Henry had a 22-acre factory complex outside of Pittsburgh, complete with steam heat, electric lights, “equine palaces” for the 110 jet-black Heinz horses (who pulled cream-colored wagons trimmed in pickle green), and a 1,200-seat auditorium with a stained glass dome. The pickle became a national icon in 1893, when Henry passed out free pickle-shaped watch charms (stamped with the name HEINZ) at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. By 1896, Henry had a forty-foot electric pickle dazzling the residents of New York City on Fifth Avenue.

  Burpee’s 1888 seed catalog carried the Serpent or Snake cucumber, which grew up to six feet in length, coiled like a snake.

  Until the Heinz era, little effort had gone into the improvement of the cucumber. The first notably deliberate attempt at cucumber hybridization resulted in Tail
by’s Hybrid, a high-yield large-fruited cucumber introduced to gardens in 1872. It was carried in Burpee’s 1888 catalog, along with 19 other cucumber varieties, including the Russian or Khiva Netted cucumber, oval with a white-netted brown skin, said to be “well adapted for cold, bleak situations,” and the Serpent or Snake cucumber, which grew up to six feet in length, coiled like a snake. Seed purveyors Vilmorin-Andrieux describe this last in The Vegetable Garden (1885), adding that when ripe it exudes “a strong odour of Melons.” Among their other twenty-seven listed cucumber cultivars is the Bonneuil Large White, a sweetly scented, papaya-shaped cucumber grown near Paris exclusively for use in perfumes.

  Vilmorin-Andrieux suggests that growers straighten their market cucumbers (“as one good and straight Cucumber is worth nearly a dozen small and deformed ones”) and describes a method for doing so, by forcing the young fruits into open-ended cylindrical glasses. More than a thousand workers were employed in this task in one English market garden, according to Vilmorin-Andrieux, which somehow brings to mind such horticultural oddities as Lewis Carroll’s gardeners painting the roses red in Wonderland. Those cucumbers too far gone in deformity were brutally sent to the pickle factory.

  The obsession with straightening the cucumber is an ancient one. Early Chinese growers suspended stones from the ends of fruits with a tendency to curl, and modern breeders have selected for straightness, along with such traits as size, yield, disease resistance, flavor, and that commercial bugbear, shelf life. Innumerable cultivars are available today including many time-honored heirloom breeds, among them the Lemon, which looks like one; the White Wonder, a dull ivory color; the tiny Crystal Apple; and the dirigible-shaped Zeppelin.

  Flavor in garden cucumbers has been plagued by bitterness, the occasional mouthful of which still gives a chilling reminder of what cucumber-eating was like in the bad old days of the prehistoric Himalayan wilds. The bitterness is due to a class of compounds called cucurbitacins, terpene derivatives that are as repulsive to certain insect pests as they are to human beings. Cucurbitacin-less mutants have been developed, enabling growers to produce crops of nonbitter cucumbers, but the tastier fruits, chemically disarmed, are consequently more susceptible to insect damage.

  Bitterness varies from crop to crop and from year to year — even from cucumber to cucumber — with no real explanation to date as to just why. Some varieties are more prone to bitterness than others; but in all cases bitterness seems related to stress: too much chilly weather, for example, or not enough rain.

  In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Lemuel Gulliver, on his post-Lilliput voyage to Laputa, ran into what may have been the first of the scientific cucumbers. Their caretaker, reported Gulliver, “had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”

  * * *

  Sex and Size

  Cucumbers, like their relatives, the melons, squashes, and pumpkins, are monoecious. The flowers, showy yellow-orange numbers with five-lobed corollas, either possess five (male) stamens or a single (female) pistil with three stigmas. The males usually grow in clusters; the females are loners.

  Many pickling cultivars these days, however, are sexual oddities. Botanically known as gynoecious plants, these vines bear only female flowers and consequently produce unusually heavy crops. Even odder are parthenocarpic cucumbers, which seem to have escaped the sexual rat race altogether. They set fruit without benefit of pollination and thus produce no seeds. To succeed at this, the plants must be closely protected from invading pollen, a feat difficult enough to quadruple the price of the seedless offspring.

  As well as de-sexing the cucumber, breeders have made them small. The trailing vines of the standard indeterminate cultivar nab for themselves four square feet or so of garden living space; bush cultivars can occupy less than half that, though space-saving gardeners pay the price in reduced yields. The average standard cultivar produces about fifteen cucumbers per plant; the average bush model, about ten.

  * * *

  It sounds less far-fetched nowadays, though to date no one seems to have put a hand to it. Instead, the Japanese have invented a cucumber-flavored Pepsi, to be used for keeping cool.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In Which

  AN EGGPLANT

  CAUSES A

  HOLY MAN TO FAINT

  plus

  A Trek along the Silk Road,

  The Ashy Apples of Sodom, Dining at

  Delmonico’s, Thomas Say’s Beetle,

  A Pot of Magic Molasses, and

  A Condiment for Cannibals

  The man who sees on New Year’s Day Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant is forever blessed.

  JAPANESE PROVERB

  In Daniel Pinkwater’s Borgel (1990) — one of the most hilarious kids’ science-fiction books of all time — Melvin’s mysterious space- and time-traveling Uncle Borgel tells his young nephew the story of “The Rabbit and the Eggplant,” in which an eggplant challenges a rabbit to a footrace. The townspeople, convinced that the eggplant has some clever trick up its sleeve, bet all their money on it. On the day of the race, the rabbit streaks out of sight and crosses the finish line, while the eggplant just sits there. The infuriated spectators turn on it and eat it. The moral of the story: “Don’t bet on an eggplant.”

  For much of history, however, people in effect have been doing just that, since transforming the eggplant from its unpleasant wild ancestor to the lush fat fruit of today must have looked like a long shot. It certainly took a lot of blind faith, dedication, and effort. The original eggplant, botanists believe, blossomed somewhere in south central Asia, where its peculiar-looking fruits, bitter taste, and nasty thorns did little to recommend it to the primitive palate. Nonetheless, some hardy soul eventually domesticated it.

  Traditionally, this took place in India, where eggplant pops up in Sanskrit documents as early as 300 BCE. An alternative, or possibly simultaneous, site is China, where a recent survey of ancient Chinese plant literature identified eggplants under cultivation in the Chengdu (Sichuan) province in 59 BCE. Today China and India are the world’s top eggplant producers, with the United States trailing far behind, in twentieth place.

  The original Chinese eggplant didn’t taste good, and the best guess is that it was originally cultivated for use as a medicine. (A Chinese medical treatise of the sixteenth century describes eggplant-based preparations for everything from intestinal hemorrhage to toothache.) Perhaps for this reason, when eggplant finally made it to the table, it was eaten nervously. Like the notorious blowfish, it was thought safe only if prepared by trained cooks. Its Chinese name, ch’ieh-pzu, in most pessimistic translation, means poison.

  As increasing numbers of diners cleaned their plates without lethal incident, the eggplant become more commonly acceptable, although it still retained a reputation for danger. It reached the Middle East by the sixth century, probably via traders on the Silk Road. Persian physicians were skittish about it, attributing to it a long list of harmful effects, among them pimples, leprosy, and elephantiasis.

  The cooks, however, won out, and in the Middle East, the eggplant attained true culinary stardom. Persian chefs, who had already mastered such challenges as smoked camel’s hump, zebra, and Arabian ostrich, were hardly people to balk at eggplant and soon devised hundreds of recipes. The later Turks, whose versatile cuisine featured raisins and olives, goats and pigeons, rose water, almonds, yogurt, and powdered pistachio nuts, were said to eat eggplant at every meal. One dish, eggplant stuffed with pine nuts, was reputedly so overwhelmingly scrumptious that it was known as Imam Bayildi (“The Holy Man Fainted”) because such was its gustatory effect. (An alternative version of the story holds that the cleric fainted in horror, having discovered that his young bride had used up her entire dowry of olive oil in cooking eggplant.)

  The eggplant traveled with the invading Moors through northern Africa and into Spain, whe
re in the twelfth century a horticulturally accomplished Moorish Spaniard named Ibnal-Awam described four cultivated varieties: white, violet, dark purple, and black. It arrived in northern Europe by the thirteenth century, where it was received squeamishly. Practically everybody except the dauntless Italians refused to eat it, though it did achieve some popularity in upper-class gardens as an exotic ornamental.

  The lavishly illustrated Tacuinum Sanitatis — a series of medieval health manuals translated from the Arabic and much prized by fitness-conscious aristocratic fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europeans — includes wonderful images of purple eggplants. The accompanying text warned that eggplant was an aphrodisiac: in one illustration a pair of lovers, presumably overcome by desire, embrace in front of a row of eggplants, while an eggplant-impervious chaperon shakes a scandalized finger at them.

  Common in Renaissance Europe were small white-fruited varieties — hence the descriptive name “egg” plant — but other types were known. Leonhart Fuchs (1542) mentions purple and yellow eggplants; Rembert Dodoens (1580) — who calls them “unholsome” and claims they fill the body with evil humors — mentions purple and “pale”; and Jacques Dalechamp (1587) describes purple, yellow and “ash-colored” varieties in long, round, and pear shapes.

  Master herbalist John Gerard, who lists white, yellow, and brown eggplants in his Great Herball (1597), adds that the Egyptians eat them boiled and roasted, with oil, vinegar, and pepper, and then warns that nobody else should do likewise: “I wish Englishmen to content themselves with meats and sauce of our owne country than with fruit eaten with apparent peril; for doubtless these Raging Apples have a mischevious qualitie, the use whereof is utterly to be forsaken.” John Parkinson in Paradisi in Sole (1629), sounding disbelieving, writes that “in Italy and other hot countries . . . they do eate them [eggplants] with more desire and pleasure than we do Cowcumbers.”