by Rebecca Rupp
Pliny describes three kinds of radishes: a long and “semi-transparent” — which is possibly the long white radish that appears in a wall painting in Pompeii, heaped in a basket beside a bunch of grapes and a plate of figs; the turnip-shaped or Syrian radish, which keeps well over the winter; and a wild radish, “which grows more leaves than root.” Pliny’s turnip-shaped radish was most likely the black radish, Raphanus sativus var. niger, a winter radish, harvested late in the gardening season and known for its long-term staying power. Thought to be the oldest of cultivated radishes, the black radish was a popular crop in ancient Egypt. It appears in tomb paintings as early as 2800 BCE and Herodotus, in his Histories, written in the fifth century BCE, claims that radishes were a primary food of the pyramid builders.
The most common black radish grown today is the Round Black Spanish, which looks like a large licorice-colored beet. In its original incarnation, however, the black radish was huge, weighing anywhere from 40 to 100 pounds. Pliny mentions radishes the size of human babies, and an ancient Jewish legend tells of a radish so immense that a fox hollowed it out and used it for a den. Rowdy Romans reputedly used radishes as projectiles during unpopular political debates, and among the Greeks, the punishment for adultery — which, given the size of the classical radish, was intimidating — was to have a radish thrust up one’s behind. When not angrily airborne (or worse), radishes were eaten cooked like turnips, or raw in salad, seasoned with honey, vinegar, pepper, and salt.
In ancient Greece, the punishment for adultery was to have a radish thrust up one’s behind.
Radishes today are generally differentiated by season: spring radishes, such as the fat little red globes of the French Breakfast or Cherry Belle radish and the carrot-shaped White Icicle, develop rapidly and don’t store well; and winter radishes, such as the aforementioned Round Black Spanish and the awesome Asian daikon, which grow more slowly, are substantially bigger, and keep better.
The radish is mentioned in the Chinese Shih Ching or Book of Odes, a collection of poems which dates to about 1000 BCE. By the time Western travelers arrived in Asia, radishes were a major food crop, available in many varieties, some of astounding size. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, arriving in Japan in 1853, observed radishes up to a yard long and a foot in circumference.
Perry’s behemoth was almost certainly R. sativus var. longipinnatus, the daikon — known as the Japanese radish, though the Japanese probably acquired it from China. The name translates as “long root,” which makes perfect sense, since even an average daikon is an impressive foot and a half long. The Japanese have hundreds of ways of preparing their mega-radishes — and a daikon-heavy diet, according to Naomi Moriyama, author of Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat (2006), helps give Japanese women the lowest obesity rate (3 percent) and longest life expectancy (85 years) in the world.
Radishes may be annual or biennial. Table radishes — the small round red-skinned types — are annuals; the large late-season winter radishes, however, like daikons, are biennial, the seeds produced in their second year. In all radishes, the tiny seeds are borne in beanlike pods, formally known as siliques. In the seventeenth century, such radish pods, pickled, were a standard accompaniment to the dinner roast.
All radish pods are edible, though the rat-tailed radish, R. sativus var. caudatus, is grown specifically for its edible pods, which — pungent, pencil-thin, and curly — can be more than a foot long. Also known as the serpent, snake, or aerial radish, the rat-tail was originally Asian, introduced to England from Java in 1815. The pods are eaten raw in salads, where they taste much like radish roots, or are pickled or stir-fried. The München Bier Radish, a white winter variety, is also grown for its crispy green pods, which are popular as snacks in German beer gardens.
In medieval Europe, the radish occupied both a substantial place on the dinner table and a sizeable niche in the medicine cabinet. Charlemagne demanded that radishes be planted in his estate gardens. In Hortulus, or The Little Garden, his instructional poem about gardening, ninth-century Frankish monk Walafrid Strabo (“the Squint-Eyed”) writes:
* * *
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair
In the traditional fairy tale “Rapunzel,” included by the Brothers Grimm in their Children’s and Household Tales (1812), the long-haired heroine, according to some versions, is named for a type of radish. Her mother craved radishes while pregnant, which led her father to steal some from a neighboring witch’s garden. Caught in the act, radishes in hand, the father was forced to hand his infant daughter over to the witch.
* * *
“Here in the last bed we find radishes, with their mighty roots and spread of leaves. When coughing shakes your insides, the sharp root of the radish suppresses it. If you eat some, or make a drink from crushed radish seeds, it will very often heal the suffering caused by this malicious illness.”
According to various other authorities, radishes were also used to treat viper or adder bites and to alleviate the pains of childbirth, were administered as a general-purpose antidote for poison, and were applied to remove freckles. John Gerard in 1597 recommended radish roots for baldness, mashed with honey and mixed with a little powder of dried sheep’s heart. In the seventeenth century William Salmon, a self-styled “Professor of Physick,” prescribed “juyce of Radishes” for deafness, at the top of a list of less appealing remedies, including the “fat of a mole, eele, or serpent,” essence of bullock’s gall, and a boy’s distilled urine. More excitingly, a medieval superstition claimed that wearing a wild radish allowed the bearer to see witches, at least on Walpurgis Night.
The radish reached North America with the European settlers. “8 oz. Radish seed” appears on John Winthrop, Jr.’s 1631 seed list. Naturalist Peter Kalm, tooling through New York in 1749, commented on the customary Dutch breakfast of tea with brown sugar, bread and butter, and radishes. (Dinner was meat with turnips or cabbages; supper, corn porridge and buttermilk.) At least ten varieties were grown in gardens by the late eighteenth century, of which Thomas Jefferson grew eight — the black, the common, the English scarlet, the salmon, the scarlet, the summer, the violet, and the white — and instructed that new plantings be started every two weeks beginning in March, to ensure a plentiful supply for salads.
According to Amelia Simmons, the “Salmon-coloured” was the best, next best the purple. “They grow thriftiest,” she tells us, “sown among the onions.” (Amelia gives much shorter shrift to the pungent radish relative, horseradish: “Horse Radish, once in the garden, can scarcely ever be totally eradicated; plowing or digging them up with that view, seems at times rather to increase and spread them.”)
The colonists grew both the large mild winter radishes, suitable for months of storage in the family root cellar, and the smaller, zingier, and more quickly maturing summer radishes. The earliest of these summer varieties, white and carrot-shaped, was introduced in the late sixteenth century, white and red globular forms were developed by the eighteenth, and thereafter shapes, sizes, and colors proliferated.
By the nineteenth century, the catalog of Vilmorin-Andrieux listed twenty-five varieties of summer radishes, subdivided by shape into round or “turnip-rooted” radishes (ten kinds in scarlet, white, dark violet, or dull yellow), “olive-shaped” radishes (seven kinds, including the popular French Breakfast, which looks less like an olive than a cork); and “long” radishes (eight kinds, including the bizarre Mans Corkscrew, a pure white radish with a foot-long, sharply twisted, zigzag root, almost impossible to pull out of the ground without breaking in two).
In 1888, the Burpee seed catalog listed twenty-eight varieties of early or summer radishes, preceded by the reproachful sales pitch: “We wish that Americans appreciated good radishes and used them as largely as do the French. For breakfast, dinner, and supper, three times a day, they are a most appetizing and wholesome relish.” Prominent among these was Burpee’s yellow-skinned Golden Globe, first introduced in 1880, of which an ecstatic Missouri customer wrote that
some of his were sixteen inches in circumference, or about the size of a grapefruit. Also offered were the rat-tailed radish and five varieties of winter radishes, including the famous Black Spanish (both round and sausage-shaped) and the rose-skinned China Rose.
Today there are hundreds of varieties of radishes in every color of the rainbow — the most gorgeous of which may be the watermelon radish, a green-skinned daikon variety with watermelon-pink flesh. Sliced, it looks like a very small watermelon. Bitten, it tastes like a radish.
One customer’s Golden Globe radishes were sixteen inches in circumference, or about the size of a grapefruit.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In Which
SPINACH DECEIVES
A GENERATION
OF CHILDREN
plus
Popeye’s Power Snack, Persian Cats,
Florentine Dinners, A Contrary King,
Puritan Prayers, and Alice Roosevelt’s Pet Snake
I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.
E. B. WHITE
Popeye, according to the latest in sports-oriented nutrition, would have done better for himself with a plate of spaghetti. Spinacia oleracea, garden spinach, for all its vaunted muscle-building power, is far better known for vitamin A, of which it contains a lot: 14,500 units per cooked cupful. Vitamin A is great for night vision, which means that Popeye the Sailor Man would have had an edge as a night pilot, but it’s not much as a pick-me-up prior to a dockside brawl. Still, the spinach-gulping sailor, who first appeared in the comic pages in 1929, convinced a generation of Depression-era kids to do likewise, boosting spinach consumption by a third over the next decade.
Legendarily, Popeye’s spinach was famed for its iron content, the stuff that builds red blood and brawn. A persistent myth holds that the reputation of Popeye’s spinach was the result of one of the worst typos in history: a misplaced German decimal point that led agricultural chemist Emil von Wolff in 1870 to inadvertently attribute to spinach ten times more iron that it deserved. Spinach, the beneficiary of this supposed egregious goof, was touted thereafter as a cheap equivalent for traditionally iron-rich T-bone steak.
* * *
Uses for Spinach Juice
Spinach juice — deeply and intensely green — was used as a food coloring up through the nineteenth century, and seasonally, at eighteenth- and nineteenth-century celebrations, to make touchpaper for fireworks. Soaked in spinach juice and dried, paper smoldered when lit, and was found just the thing for touching off Roman candles and Catherine wheels.
* * *
The truth is a bit more complex. Spinach is a rich source of iron, containing some 3.2 mg per serving (that is, per cooked half cup), actually slightly more than an equivalent serving of red meat. For the most part, however, we can’t get at it. In heme iron, which constitutes up to 40 percent of the iron in meats, the essential iron is helpfully encased in an organic ring molecule, which we find easy to absorb. Non-heme iron — the iron of spinach — is largely out of our digestive reach. Ordinarily we absorb less than 5 percent of the total — though we can up the intake substantially by pairing non-heme iron with vitamin C. Popeye’s swelling biceps, in other words, might have been a little more convincing if he’d paired his can of spinach with a glass of orange juice.
Botanists believe that spinach probably originated in or near Iran. The modern name derives from the Persian isfanakh, which means green hand. The Persians, one story claims, initially cultivated spinach for the delectation of their exotically long-haired cats. (The cats around here, who like cantaloupe and popcorn, won’t touch it.) They also ate it themselves and exported it to the Far East, where it caught on long before it established itself in western Europe. Chinese records, which refer to spinach as the “Persian herb,” note its arrival in 647 CE as a gift (or possibly extorted tribute) from the intermediately located king of Nepal. The Chinese liked it and planted it around the edges of their vast rice paddies, where it flourished. They used it in soups.
It took another four hundred years for the Persian herb to reach Europe, where it arrived along with the conquering Moors in eleventh-century Spain. One report mentions a treatise on spinach by Ibn Hadjadj, a Spanish Moor, who addressed it enthusiastically as “the prince of vegetables.” It’s uncertain when the princely leaf reached northern Europe: spinachium appears on a 1351 list of the unexciting fare permitted monks on fast days, and “spynoches” can be found in the fourteenth-century Forme of Cury. In the late fourteenth-century Tacuinum Sanitarium, spinach appears as “Spinachie”: the best, the text explains, are leaves still wet with rainwater.
Europeans seem to have been of two minds about spinach. John Gerard in 1597, anticipating generations of American children, said it was watery and tasteless; but Catherine de Medici, originally from Florence, Italy, and sixteenth-century queen of France, was reportedly so mad for it that to this day the phrase “Florentine” attached to anything edible means “with spinach.”
* * *
Emily Spinach
Alice, the flamboyant oldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, had a pet snake named Emily Spinach — Emily after a maiden aunt, and Spinach because the snake was spinach green.
Alice’s behavior with and without snake often drove her father to distraction. “Do you know how much talk there has been recently in the newspapers about your betting and courting notoriety with that unfortunate snake?” he wrote the 20-year-old Alice in an exasperated letter in 1904.
* * *
“What! I am king of France and I cannot eat spinach?”
Perhaps it was all in the preparation. The ancient Medes recommended washing each spinach leaf twelve times before dropping it into the cooking pot: eleven times in clear water, for best results, with a final rinse in human tears. “The dayly eating of the hearbe Spinage doth marvelously profite such having a hoarse voice, and that hardly fetch breath,” wrote an English spinach fan, “if the hearbe after proper seething and ordering be either fried with sweete butter or the oyle of Almonds, and that to it Pepper bruised be wittily added.” Another claimed that spinach chopped in oatmeal made a “sublime Pottage,” and the Dutch recommended it baked in tarts.
The French compared spinach poetically to cire-vierge — virgin beeswax — since it could adapt innocuously to any culinary situation. It was therefore said to require a great chef to do justice to its subtle and delicate flavor. Apparently such were around, as Louis XIV, denied spinach by a conscientious royal physician, bellowed in chagrin, “What! I am king of France and I cannot eat spinach?” (He could and, in the teeth of medical advice, he did.)
John Evelyn, usually enthusiastic about salad greens, was tepid about spinach, writing in Acetaria (1699), “of old not us’d in Sallets, and the oftner kept out the better.” Boiled to a pulp and served with butter and vinegar or “Limon,” he concedes, it may have a place in “a Sick Man’s Diet.” The notoriously nonmealymouthed farmer/politician William Cobbett, however, seems to have approved of it. “Every one knows the use of this excellent plant,” he writes in The English Gardener (1833). “Pigs, who are excellent judges of the relative qualities of vegetables, will leave cabbages for lettuce, and lettuces for spinage.”
Spinach arrived in North America at least by the early seventeenth century, as “1 oz. spynadg” appeared in John Winthrop, Jr.’s well-documented seed list. Chef and vegetable expert Bert Greene argues that an early Puritan children’s prayer begging divine protection from fire, famine, flood, and “unclean foreign leaves” may just possibly refer to spinach, though tobacco seems a more likely guess. Spinach, though grown, seems not to have been high on the list for most colonial gardeners. Jefferson, of course, grew it, and Mary Randolph, after warning that “great care” must be taken in washing and picking it, says that it’s good with poached eggs.
Bernard M’Mahon, in his 1802 seed catalog, mentions only three existing cultivars, and David Landreth, in his 1824 list of “Esculent Vegetable Seeds,” lists only two (“round” and �
��prickley”). Landreth, who established his seed company in Philadelphia in 1784, counted Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe among his early customers, and once patriotically granted a strapped Washington a thirty-day extension on his bill.
Chef and vegetable expert Bert Greene argues that an early Puritan children’s prayer begging divine protection from fire, famine, flood, and “unclean foreign leaves” may refer to spinach, though tobacco seems a more likely guess.
The D. Landreth Seed Company is still selling seeds today. Among its claims to fame are the introduction of the tomato and the zinnia to garden cultivation, the first American listing of cantaloupe seed (imported from a source in Tripoli), and the development of a superior and notably slow-bolting spinach. Named Bloomsdale after the company farm in Bristol, Pennsylvania, the new spinach, glossily dark green with thick crumpled leaves, was first made available to American gardeners in 1826.
Bloomsdale is a smooth- or round-seeded spinach, the smooth seeds a feature that appeared, presumably by spontaneous mutation, at some point in the sixteenth century. Older and more primitive spinaches produced prickly seeds. Neither, in a strict botanical sense, is a seed at all, but a utricle (fruit) encased in a smooth or spiny capsule. The prickly-seeded varieties, nicknamed “winter” spinaches in the mistaken belief that they were more resistant to cold, were once more common in the United States, though food critics deem them less flavorful than their smooth-seeded relations. Smooth-seeded “summer” spinach predominates today.
