By Joel Denker
What would people think of me, I remembered, when I first began trying arugula? It seems like ancient history now, but there was a time when there was a stigma attached to the rarefied leaf. Consuming arugua marked you as an elitist, an effete snob. During his first campaign, President Obama was mocked for a mere reference to it.
How did this once plebeian plant become sophisticated? In earlier civilizations, rocket (its English name) was hardly the fashionable garden plant of today. It was more like an herb, whose sharp flavor was inseparable from its reputed healing and erotic powers. Known in Latin as eruca, from the word for “harsh, rough,” the plant is a member of the mustard family. Native to the Mediterranean, it was an unruly weed that was foraged from the fields by the poor. Arugula and bread made a simple peasant meal.
Rocket, whose leaves and seeds contain a peppery mustard oil, was said to have a fiery, potent nature. The Romans, who eventually cultivated the plant, extracted the oil. They savored its leaves accented with pepper and cumin and dressed with garum, a fermented fish sauce.
The literati extolled rocket as a sexual stimulant. “If those leaves of wild rocket, picked with left hand, are pounded and drunk in honey water, they serve as aphrodisiac,” the naturalist Pliny wrote. To Ovid, the Roman poet, the plant was “lascivious.”
The herb offered a multitude of benefits, other commentators said. “Rocket, eaten in a rather large quantity, arouses to intercourse; its seed has the same effect,” the Greek physician Dioscorides stated. “It is diuretic, digestive, and good for the bowel. They also use the seed as a flavoring in cooked dishes.”
Rocket was sacred to Priapus, the Graeco-Roman god of fertility. Beds of the greens were planted around his statue. The leaf, the Roman author Columnella wrote, honored the deity: “Th’eruca, Priapus, near thee we sow, To arouse to duty husbands who are slow.”
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To learn more about arugula, see The Carrot Purple and Other Curious Stories of the Food We Eat, coming in October from Rowman & Littlefield: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442248861/The-Carrot-Purple-and-Other-Curious-Stories-of-the-Food-We-Eat.
