How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  Still, lettuce’s reputation for putting people to sleep may account in part for its reputation as an anti-aphrodisiac. Dioscorides, the first-century Greek naturalist who served as a surgeon to Emperor Nero’s soldiers, wrote that lettuce would protect lonely enlisted men from dreams filled with “libidinous images.” John Evelyn’s Acetaria (1699) lists among the many admirable qualities of salad greens “beneficial influences on morals, temperance, and chastity.” A dire Elizabethan anti-lettuce warning states:

  “The plentifull and dayly eating of the Lettuce by married persons is very incommodious and noisome to them, in that it not only doth diminish the fruitfulness of children, but the children often borne do become idle foolish and peevish persons.”

  The only naysayers in this litany of lettuce-dampened ardor seem to have been the ancient Egyptians, who viewed lettuce as Viagra and dedicated it to Min, the coal-black god of fertility, usually depicted with a crown of feathers and an immense erect penis. The discrepancy — why the same plant turned Europeans off and Egyptians on — has been the subject of research by Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini. After studying depictions of lettuce in Egyptian bas-reliefs, Samorini determined that Min’s lettuce was Lactuca serriola, a bitter biennial believed to be the ancestor of modern cultivated lettuce, now found growing wild over most of the temperate world.

  Tough and spiny — its common name is prickly lettuce — L. serriola is a pest in pastureland, since cattle who misguidedly eat it develop emphysema. Its latex, however, is rich in phyto-chemicals, and Samorini argues that the sexual effect (or lack of) is a matter of dosage. At low lettuce doses, according to Samorini, the effects of lettuce lactones — lactucin and lactucopicrin — predominate. These are the compounds that give lettuce its bitter taste, protect the growing plants from leaf-munching insects, and, in people, have a sedative effect. At higher doses, however, latex’s component of cocaine-like tropane alkaloids kicks in, eliciting euphoria, excitement, and arousal. The Europeans, Samorini argues, simply didn’t eat enough lettuce.

  Lettuce, taxonomically, belongs to Asteraceae, the Daisy or Sunflower family, a collection of some 1,600 genera and over 22,000 species, among them such garden favorites as marigolds, chrysanthemums, zinnias, Jerusalem artichokes, dandelions, and Artemisia absinthium (wormwood), from which is distilled the green alcoholic drink absinthe. The ancestral lettuce, L. serriola, according to genetic and population-diversity analyses, probably originated in eastern Turkey and Armenia, and was domesticated slowly over a long period, perhaps first being grown not as a salad herb, but for the oil contained in its seeds.

  According to Herodotus’s gossipy Histories, cultivated lettuce, Lactuca sativa, less bitter, less prickly, and leafier than its wild ancestor, was being served at the royal tables of Persia by 550 BCE. The ancient Greeks served it up flavored with saffron and olive oil, and carried green pots of it through the streets during the springtime Festival of Adonis. The Romans — who disseminated lettuce throughout their empire — preceded their gargantuan banquets with refreshing lettuce salads, in the belief that lettuce enhanced the appetite and relaxed the alimentary canal in preparation for an onslaught of camels’ heels, flamingo tongues, stuffed warblers, and sea anemones smothered in fermented fish sauce. Lettuce was also occasionally eaten cooked or pickled. The Roman cookbook Apicius includes recipes for a “Field Salad” of lettuce dressed in vinegar and brine and a “Harmless Salad” in an infusion of ginger, rue, “meaty dates,” pepper, honey, and cumin.

  The medicinal reputation of lettuce may have enabled it to survive the Roman departure from northern Europe, when many other Roman-introduced plants were abandoned and lost. Lettuce is included in the early fifteenth-century Tacuinum Sanitatis, accompanied by an illustration of a blonde in a blue gown clutching a clump of leaf lettuce; an appended note warns that lettuce is harmful “to coitus and the eyesight,” but adds that its dangers can be alleviated by mixing it with celery. The early English were hardly salad fans: Queen Elizabeth ate beef, mutton, and rabbit pie for breakfast, and a perfectly acceptable Tudor company dinner consisted of meats, fish, bread, and beer, with a few “Orenges” for dessert.

  Contemporary vegetables did include lettuce, cabbage, spinach, and radishes, though “rude herbs and roots” were generally considered fit only for the starving and the poor, or, worse, “more meet for hogs and savage beast to feed upon, than mankind.” Lettuce’s persistent reputation as a sex suppressant also did it little good. Still, the seventeenth-century French courageously consumed it — lettuce hearts, candied, were eaten in a sweet dish called gorge d’ange, or “angel’s throat” — and the domineering Louis XIV (father of seven) liked lettuce salads seasoned with tarragon, pimpernel, basil, and violets. John Evelyn, in Acetaria, calls lettuce a “Noble Plant” and lists popular contemporary cultivars, among them the familiar-sounding cabbage, cos, curled, and oak-leaf lettuces, plus a variety called Passion, a peculiar moniker in the context of the times.

  According to famed gastronome Joan Anthelme Brillat-Savarin in The Physiology of Taste (1825), at least one destitute young Frenchman became very rich serving salads to the English. M. d’Albignac’s career began when he mixed a salad dressing for a group of young men at a restaurant in London, a performance so impressive and delicious that he was next invited “to dress a Salad” at a mansion in Grosvenor Square. More invitations followed and soon, nicknamed “the fashionable Salad-maker,” d’Albignac had purchased a carriage in which he traveled from dinner party to dinner party, toting a fitted mahogany case filled with salad-dressing ingredients. By the time he returned to France, he had amassed a fortune, with which he purchased an estate “on which, for aught I know,” Brillant-Savarin concludes fairy-tale-fashion, he lived happily ever after.

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  Monticello Mondays

  Thomas Jefferson, who was mad for lettuce, planted fifteen different kinds at Monticello, directing that “A Thimbleful of Lettuce should be sowed every Monday morning, from Feb. first to Sept. 1” to ensure a continual fresh supply. A description of the typical Jeffersonian salad comes from Mary Randolph, who directs that lettuce be gathered first thing in the morning, washed, and laid in cold water (better yet, with ice) until just before dinner, when it should be drained, cut into a bowl, and dressed with a mix of egg, oil, salt, sugar, mustard, and tarragon vinegar.

  Among the Monticello favorites were Dutch Brown, a red-tinged “loaf” or head lettuce; Tennis-ball, a miniature head variety, popular for serving whole in individual salads; Ice, which “loafed” in early June, possibly an early version of the modern Iceberg; Marseilles; and White Loaf, also called Common Cabbage lettuce.

  * * *

  L. sativa came to America with Columbus, who planted some in the West Indies in 1493. A quick crop, it was favored by greens-hungry early explorers. Samuel de Champlain and company planted some on an island in the St. Croix River in Maine in 1619, and Captain John Smith’s crew followed suit some years later, planting an island garden that “served us for sallets in June and July.” The first European colonists arrived equipped for salad planting. Three ounces of “lettice” seed appeared on John Winthrop, Jr.’s 1631 bill of garden seeds.

  Lettuce was routinely planted in kitchen gardens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At George Washington’s Mount Vernon, 16 of the 61 plots in his near-acre-sized kitchen garden were devoted to lettuce. A visitor notes that dinner with the General was “very good, a small roasted pig, boiled leg of lamb, roasted fowles, beef, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, artichokes, puddings, tarts, etc.” Another, less grateful, recorded snarkily that the Washington salads lacked olive oil.

  In 1806, according to Bernard M’Mahon’s Gardener’s Calendar, Americans were choosing among a mere six cultivars of lettuce. By 1828, New York’s Grant Thorburn had upped the count to thirteen, and by the 1880s, there were well over a hundred. Early catalogs and listings featured all four of the lettuce types available today: head or cabbage, butterhead, looseleaf, and cos or ro
maine. Heading lettuce, L. sativa var. capitata, became the universally preferred lettuce in the late nineteenth century, as reflected by its availability in seed catalogs. Burpee’s 1888 Farm Annual, for example, listed twenty-four head lettuce varieties, four cos cultivars, and three looseleafs. Vilmorin-Andrieux’s The Vegetable Garden (1885) described fifty-six head lettuces, seventeen cos types, and four looseleafs (under the name “small or cutting” lettuces).

  Heading lettuce appeared on the vegetable scene in medieval times — and perhaps only with difficulty then, since a surviving horticultural hint from the 1570s suggests trampling on young seedlings to encourage proper head formation. Advice of the same ilk outlined a means of producing “Odiferous Lettice” by embedding the seed in the seed of a citron, and more flavorful lettuce by watering nightly with sweet wine. This last technique must not have worked, since the dense-packed heads of leaves seem to have been relatively tasteless almost from their inception.

  A Treatise on Gardening (1765) written by “A Citizen of Virginia” — believed to be Thomas Jefferson’s cousin John Randolph — says of them: “This sort of Lettuce is the worst of all kinds in my opinion. It is the most watery and flashy, does not grow to the size that many of the other sorts will do, and very soon runs to seed.” It seems to have been used mostly for soups, like the solid-headed cabbages it so closely resembled.

  Tasteless or no, head lettuces continue to dominate the American market, pale cannonball-like vegetables relentlessly shipped east from the lettuce fields of California. (California produces some 70 percent of this country’s lettuce, the bulk of it in head varieties.) An earlier and more lettucelike form of var. capitata is butterhead lettuce, which forms soft, loose, floppy-eared heads around hearts of such tender consistency that early eaters were reminded of butter. Most familiar of butterhead lettuces are the Boston lettuce and Bibb, or Kentucky limestone, lettuce, developed by Kentuckian John J. Bibb in the late 1800s and served by the dedicated at Kentucky Derby breakfasts.

  Cos or romaine lettuce, L. sativa var. longifolia, also forms an upright “head” around a central bud or heart, but the romaine heads are loose, long, and cylindrical. The individual leaves are elongated ovals, reminiscent of kitchen tasting spoons, and one story holds that Socrates drank his lethal dose of hemlock from such a “spoon” of romaine.

  The common name romaine is a corruption of Roman; the even older name cos is taken from the Greek island of Cos, where the Romans originally obtained these mildly tangy leaves. It arrived in France in the 1300s, when the papacy, after much ill-advised meddling in earthly politics, abruptly relocated from Italy to French Avignon, bringing their garden vegetables with them. In France, the Roman lettuce came to be known as the frenchified Romaine, and became so popular that outside the country it was called Paris lettuce. An heirloom cultivar called Paris White Cos is still available today.

  Romaine lettuce is said to have reached China in the seventeenth century, when the ruling emperor demanded as tribute the choicest vegetable grown in each of his subject domains. He received, among other offerings, beets, scallions, spinach, and romaine lettuce, known in the Far East as the wine vegetable because reportedly it tasted like wine. Appropriately, today the erstwhile Roman lettuce is the main ingredient of Caesar salads.

  Tastier yet are the looseleaf lettuces, L. sativa var. crispa, a mixed bag of nonheading greens whose flat, frilled, or double-ruffled leaves in bright green, dark red, and bronze are ornamental as well as delectable in the salad bowl. These are known as cut-and-come-again lettuces because, if consistently picked, new leaves will continue to sprout throughout the summer growing season.

  Prominent among these is the perennially popular Black-Seeded Simpson, a direct descendant of the Early Curled Simpson introduced by grower A. M. Simpson in 1864. Older are Oak Leaf lettuce, named for its lobed oak-leaf-shaped leaves, and an entrancing breed called Deer Tongue, whose pointy leaves reminded somebody of the tongues of deer. In 1973 a looseleaf lettuce made legal history when it was awarded the first patent — strictly speaking, a Plant Variety Protection Certificate — ever granted by the federal government to a plant seed product. The recipient was Burpee’s Green Ice, a deep green, crinoline-like lettuce of “outstanding taste and looks.”

  While salad lettuce appears in colors ranging from ruby red to pearl white, the shade we most associate with it is leaf green — the color of dollar bills, which is why “lettuce” has been a slang term for money since 1929. Green, in plants, is due to the pigment chlorophyll, a complex ring compound with a central magnesium ion, chemically similar to the iron-toting heme molecule of human and animal red blood cells. There are five known kinds of chlorophyll — a, b, c, d, and f — each of which absorbs light of a slightly different range of wavelengths.

  Chlorophyll f, for example, only discovered in 2010, is most active at a wavelength of 706 nanometers (nm), at the far-red end of the visible spectrum, which, for chlorophyll, is off the beaten track. The most common form of chlorophyll in higher plants is chlorophyll a, an attractive bright bluish green pigment that absorbs in the mid-red region of the spectrum, most efficiently at a wavelength of 662 nm. Substitution of an oxygen molecule for a crucial pair of hydrogens converts chlorophyll a to olive-green chlorophyll b, present to about half the amount of a. It prefers blue light, preferably at a wavelength of 453 nm.

  Along with assorted carotenoid pigments, chlorophyll uses the energy absorbed from sunlight to convert unprepossessing carbon dioxide and water into sugar, a process known as photosynthesis. Leaves, such as those of lettuce, are specialized for this purpose, large flat surfaces crammed with chlorophyll molecules, the better to soak up the sun.

  The chlorophyll craze began with chlorophyll-based toothpaste — marketed by Pepsodent in 1950 as the green Chlorodent — followed by a chlorophyll-flavored dogfood.

  In the 1950s, chlorophyll perversely received what was probably its biggest publicity boost, and not from the fact that it provides our planet with food, but from its purported ability to eliminate smells. The chlorophyll craze started with Benjamin Gruskin, a respectable Finnish-born doctor at Temple University, who in the 1930s developed a semisynthetic water-soluble form of chlorophyll, now known as chlorophyllin. Gruskin had high hopes for his chlorophyll derivative as an all-purpose treatment for infection. Initial studies indicated that it was effective against everything from peritonitis and brain abscesses to burns, ulcers, and the common cold. Results from subsequent investigations, however — some by the U.S. Army — were much less promising, and drug manufacturers chose instead to pursue antibiotics.

  Soluble chlorophyll did, however, interest a double-barreled Irishman named O’Neill Ryan, Jr., who took out a “use” patent on Gruskin’s discovery in 1945. The first of Ryan’s brain-children was a chlorophyll-based toothpaste — marketed by Pepsodent in 1950 as the green Chlorodent — followed by a chlorophyll-flavored dogfood. Over the next two years, spurred on by growing ranks of chlorophyll consumers, diverse businesses entered the marketplace with chlorophyll chewing gum, mouthwash, deodorant, cigarettes, soap, shampoo, skin lotion, bubble bath, popcorn, diapers, sheets, and socks. A chlorophyll-based pipe tobacco was said to keep pipes as “fresh as an alfalfa leaf.” Schiaparelli invented a chlorophyll cologne.

  Plans were in the works for chlorophyll salami and chlorophyll beer when the Food and Drug Administration rained all over the green parade, announcing that there was “no conclusive evidence” that chlorophyll had any deodorizing effect on anything whatsoever. The Journal of the American Medical Association caustically pointed out that goats, which practically live on chlorophyll, smell dreadful; and in 1953 the British Medical Journal published the work of a Glasgow University chemist who had systematically tested the effects of chlorophyll on such undesirable effluvia as skunk, onion, garlic, and human body odor, and found it a flop. Chlorophyll products subsequently petered out, and chlorophyll returned to its everyday function.

  The more sunlight leaves receive, the more chl
orophyll and carotenoid pigments accumulate to cope with the energy input, and the darker in color the leaves become. The outer leaves of head lettuces are thus the darkest and greenest, while the inner light-deprived leaves are pigmentless and pale. The darker leaves are the most nutritious, since they are most heavily packed with the carotenoid beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A. Green leaves usually contain one carotenoid molecule for every four to five molecules of chlorophyll, a ratio that supplies looseleaf lettuce with a substantial 1,900 International Units of vitamin A per one hundred grams (about ten leaves). Butterhead lettuce contains only half that, and the largely light-shielded crisphead lettuce only one-sixth as much. Lettuces, in similarly decreasing order, are also sources of calcium and vitamin C.

  Other than that, the lettuce leaf consists mostly of water, about 95 percent by weight. This water is what makes lettuce crisp: cells high in water bulge turgidly against each other, producing the crunchy texture so desirable in fresh lettuce leaves. Conversely, since lettuce is so internally waterlogged, it is particularly subject to water loss and wilting. To prevent this sad happening, modern lettuce eaters often store their leaves in refrigerator crispers, confined compartments that maintain an atmosphere of high humidity.

  Best, of course, is to pick it, fresh and crisp, straight out of the garden, an occupation that has improved in status since the seventeenth century, when “to pick a salad” meant to indulge in a meaningless and trivial task. Luckily salad picking today ranks with ambitiously making hay while the sun shines, rather than with slothfully letting the grass grow under one’s feet.