By Joel Denker

The orange carrot, now so familiar, was once a novelty. In fact, this young upstart was first cultivated a little more than four hundred years ago. Until then, the purple variety was supreme. Although we consider the carrot immutable, it has been continually reinvented though the ages.

The weedy wild carrot is the oldest form of the plant. Scientists have uncovered wild carrot seeds at neolithic campsites in southern Germany and Switzerland dating back to 2500 B.C.  Unlike other members of its family—like dill, anise, coriander, and parsley, with their characteristic umbels (clusters of flowers) and aromatic seeds and roots—the carrot was not quickly cultivated. Its sisters, mostly grown in the Mediterranean and used as aromatics and medicines, seem to have been more highly valued.[1]

The wild carrot, which has a tiny, thin root, is the forebear of today’s robust, fleshy vegetable. The plant, which sprouts prolifically in the fields and roadsides, came to be known as Queen Anne’s lace. Since it is avidly chewed by the animals, it is also known as “cow’s currency.” Wild carrot also rapidly goes to seed. To protect its bounty of seeds, the plant’s umbel closes, forming a “bird’s nest,” giving it another popular nickname.[2]

Its pretty white flowers and striking umbels, sometimes with more than 12,000 petals, make it especially attractive. In its center, a purple flower often springs up. The royal shade was said to have come from a single drop of blood that fell from Queen Anne’s finger when she pricked it sewing lace.

The wild carrot was an unappealing food because of its bitterness. The carrot’s acrid taste did win it favor as a medicine. The plant, whose botanical name, Daucus, derived from the Greek word for burn, was a popular diuretic and stomach soother. The seventeenth century English herbalist Nicholas Culpepper praised its benefits to the body: “Wild carrots belong to Mercury, and expel wind and remove stiches in the side, promote the flow of urine and women’s courses, and break and expel the stone…. it helpeth conception.” [3] The flower was reputed to cure epilepsy.

The carrot has been long regarded as an aphrodisiac. The Greek name for the wild root was “philtron,” the word for loving. Many years later, the carrot retained its erotic mystique. Men in 1870s Teheran, food writer Jane Grigson reports, swore that carrots stewed in sugar enhanced their potency.[4]

To noble ladies, the wild carrot also provided an alluring adornment. During the seventeenth century reign of England’s King James I, women of the court decorated their hair, their hats, and their dresses with its feathery fronds.

How did this primitive plant come to be domesticated? An expedition of Russian agronomists found a wide variety of carrots, both wild and cultivated, many a vivid purple, growing in Afghanistan in the 1920s. The domesticated carrot, they concluded, was first grown in the mountainous terrain, where the ridges of the Hindu Kush mountains and the Himalayas meet, in the tenth century A.D.[5]

Farmers of the region, it is surmised, were unhappy with the scrawny, fork-rooted wild carrot. Through a process of selection, they were able to cultivate a tastier vegetable with thicker, smoother roots that was also more easily harvested.[6]

Purple carrots and yellow carrots, a likely mutant of the former, were introduced to the wide reaches of the Islamic empire by travelers and merchants. From Afghanistan, carrots traveled to Iran, where they were reported in the tenth century. These “Eastern carrots” cropped up in Syria a hundred years later.[7] From North Africa, the vegetables reached Spain, where Ibn Al Awam, an Arab agriculturalist in the Islamic kingdom of Andalusia, observed them. The purple carrot, he found, was “more succulent” than the yellow. He also highlighted the carrot’s other desirable attributes. It was a “diuretic” plant that “increases the sexual appetites” and “delights the heart.” [8]

Purple and yellow carrots surfaced in China during the 1300s. The import likely came from Central Asia because it was dubbed the “Iranian turnip.” [9]

The peregrinating carrot left the Mediterranean and took root in Holland, France, and Germany during the 1300s. A century later, Flemish exiles fleeing persecution in Holland transplanted the vegetable to England.

Initially, the carrot was cloaked in mystery. Many did not know what it looked like. “Carrots are red roots sold by the handful in the market,” a Parisian man instructed his new wife in the fourteenth century.[10] (What we today describe as “purple” was typically termed “red”).

After an early embrace, Europeans grew dissatisfied with the purple carrot. The issue was not flavor, because the pigment had no appreciable effect on taste. The purple’s disadvantage was that its color seeped into sauces, soups, and stews, turning them a brownish purple.[11] The color also leaked on to the cook’s hands. The yellow variety soon supplanted it.

But the reign of the yellow carrot was short-lived, and an orange root soon took center stage. Otto Banga, a Dutch agronomist documented the change. During the 1950s, Banga examined still life paintings in the Louvre and other museums and detected an intriguing pattern. By the seventeenth century, orange carrots became more prominent in Dutch painting. He noted, for example, a bunch of long, pale orange-yellow carrots in a kitchen scene drawn by P.C. van Rijck in the early 1600s. During the course of the seventeenth century, Banga found a deeper orange shade in the carrots portrayed.[12]

The paintings demonstrated, Banga argued, that the Dutch had bred an orange carrot, selecting plants that had grown up in the population of yellow carrots and improving on them. “Unlearned vegetable growers,” he suggested, were the pioneering cultivators.[13] The mostly female farmers in time produced four orange varieties, from which all similarly colored modern types descend.

Carrots were no longer simply carrots any more. Systematic breeding and classification of carrots originated during the seventeenth century. Carrots were categorized by the size, shape, and length of their roots, factors that increased their yield.

No one has definitively solved the puzzle of the orange carrot. We know that it achieved Western supremacy but we don’t know exactly why. The color took hold in Holland, it is argued, because of Dutch nationalism. This carrot, it is said, honored William of Orange and his House, because the orange variety was developed during his reign.[14] It was also excellent nourishment for farm animals. The Dutch attributed the creamy yellow butter made from their Holsteins’ milk to a diet of orange carrots.[15]

But what explains the orange carrot’s wider appeal? Philipp Simon’s common sense speculation may be the most convincing: “The orange must have tasted pretty good or they might have gotten rid of it.” [16]

The versatile carrot became a staple in the food of many cultures, each of which put its own unique stamp on it. Carrots lent themselves to stews and soups but also to sweeter treatments. Dishes were also conceived that capitalized on the flavor of what many experts dub the second sweetest vegetable. In eighteenth century Europe, food writer Jane Grigson observes, this was not unusual: “When new vegetables came in, they were viewed without savoury prejudice.” [17]

The English made puddings enriched with carrots. Hannah Glasse, the famous eighteenth century English food writer, offered a recipe for carrot custard in puff pastry. The sweet was made with lavish amounts of cream and eggs and perfumed with nutmeg and orange blossom water.[18]

Polish and Russian Jews celebrated New Years with tzimmes, a carrot stew. To the Jews, the carrot, one of the few sweet vegetables in their homelands, was auspicious.  Fortuitously, their word for carrot, mehren, sounded like another Yiddish word, mehrn, which meant “increase or multiply.” The Jews were delighted by the coincidence. A feast of carrots, then, had to portend prosperity and good fortune.[19]

The oldest carrot heartlands also contributed ingenious confections. Both the Afghans and the Persians have conjured up a carrot jam redolent of cardamom and flavored with pistachios and almonds.[20] The Moroccans play off carrots against the sweetish tang of oranges in a classic salad.

The modern carrot continues to evolve. Feeling the pressure to develop and market new products, growers have ceaselessly transformed the vegetable. In the 1950s, carrots, which were first sold in bulk, began to be sold in the U.S. in cellophane bags. The “cello carrot” required no change in the carrot’s appearance. “It had to look like a carrot and that was enough,” geneticist Dr. Philipp Simon points out.[21] The latest marketing innovation, “baby carrots,” demanded a reconfigured product and a change in emphasis on the kind of carrot grown.

Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, revolutionized the industry by dreaming up the “baby carrot” idea. Tired of throwing out 400 tons of imperfect carrots a day at his Bakersfield packing plant, he pondered making more efficient and profitable use of his crop. Freezing plants bought his carrots and cut them into cubes, coins, and other shapes. “If they can do that, why can’t we, and pack ’em fresh,” he calculated.[22]

After first cutting them by hand in his own kitchen, he bought an industrial green bean cutter from a failing frozen food company. The machine turned out two inch pieces of the root. By 1989, Yurosek had built a mechanized operation to turn out his product.

Marketed as “baby carrots,” the miniatures are not young vegetables at all. “They’re grown-up carrots cut up into 2-inch sections, pumped through water-filled pipes into whirling cement-mixer-size peelers and whittled down to the niblets Americans know, love, and scarf down by the bagful,” as journalist Elizabeth Weise observed.[23]

The “fresh cut” segment of the carrot industry, which includes baby carrots and items like carrot chips, carrot sticks, and shredded carrots, is the fastest growing and most profitable. Baby carrots, the business’s “sweetheart,” as scientist Simon calls them, have spurred growers to concentrate on harvesting a long, thin, narrow vegetable.[24] A shorter, fatter root is less suitable for processing the high-value product. “Prior to baby carrots, the ideal length for a carrot was somewhere between 6 and 7 inches,” Simon notes.

An 8-inch carrot, a “three cut,” can produce three 2-inch babies. Further lengthening the carrot is a boon to the farmer. “You make it a four-cut, and you’ve got a 33 percent yield increase,” Simon says.[25]

Because fresh carrots must be mass produced in elaborate, large scale facilities, the industry is now the preserve of large corporations with deep pockets. Two firms, Boathouse and Grimway, control the market.[26]

Does the Western carrot of choice have to be orange? Perhaps there is a market for different shades of carrot? Dr. Simon, a University of Wisconsin horticulture professor and geneticist, has been grappling with these questions. Simon, who directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s vegetable breeding program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is America’s leading scientific breeder of carrots.

Simon, who studied potatoes as a graduate student, stumbled into carrot research because of his interest in genetics. The wide spectrum of colors among carrots piqued his curiosity. What genetic factors, he wondered, explained this phenomenon? “I got interested because it was unusual,” he said. He jumped into his investigation before he realized that colors were of “nutritional significance.” [27]

In an early experiment, Simon sharply increased beta carotene, the pigment in the orange carrot. Carotene is also used by the body to manufacture Vitamin A. The deeper orange root he produced contained four times as much of the coloring as the standard carrot. Manipulating the vegetable’s hue, he was learning, conferred significant health benefits. “About 30 percent of the vitamin A we consume comes from carrots,” Simon told a reporter in 1995. “It used to be 14 percent about 25 years ago, but it has increased due to the higher beta carotene levels in carrots today.” [28]

Like beta carotene, the pigments responsible for other colored carrots also guard the body just as they shield plant cells during photosynthesis. Lycopene, the coloring in red carrots, protects against heart disease and may keep prostate cancer at bay. The xanthophylls in yellow carrots help insure healthy eyes. The anthocyanins, which make carrots purple, are strong antioxidants.[29]

The strange colored vegetables, Simon recognized, had to be modified before they would be accepted. The purple carrot his laboratory acquired from Turkey, for example, had several handicaps. Since it was not as tasty as the orange, Simon crossed the two to make a more flavorful variety. The hybrid had another advantage. It resisted disease that the purple was victim to. “We were fascinated by dark purple carrots from Turkey, but back in Wisconsin, they literally melted in the face of sclerosia, a pathogen that attacks many carrots but not orange ones,” Simon observed. “We didn’t even know this disease was still around.” [30]

In some cultures, the purple carrot is no oddity. Şalgam, one of Turkey’s most popular refreshments, şalgam is a cool summer drink that relies on the root vegetable for its flavor. To make it, pickled carrots and turnips are fermented in barrels. Served in large glasses with a side dish of pickled carrots, it complements spicy kebab dishes. Şalgam also helps settle the stomach, its fans say, and softens the effects of raki, the intoxicating Turkish beverage.[31]

Dr. Simon is still struggling to break down American resistance to multi-colored carrots. A purple carrot, however flavorful, makes consumers nervous, even though the shade has no effect on the taste. Before sampling his vegetables, Simon found, people would ask “are they really carrots?” or “are they safe to eat?” [32] “We’ve become married to the colors we associate with particular foods,” he learned. “We eat with our eyes, to some extent.” [33]

Meanwhile, Ersu, a Turkish company has begun bottling black carrot juice, extracted from what we would call purple carrots, for export to the U.S. and other countries. The firm has great expectations for Black Miracle drink, one of its “healthy, functional, and organic products.” [34] Perhaps there is still hope that the efforts of Dr. Simon, who has two cases of purple carrot juice in his office, will not be in vain.

Acknowledgments:

I am indebted to Dr. Philipp Simon, whom I interviewed extensively, for many of the insights on carrots expressed in this paper. Conversations with long-time friend and student of botany, Peter Adams, were most helpful.

 

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Endnotes

[1] Philipp W. Simon, “Domestication, Historical Development, and Modern Breeding of Carrot,” pp. 171-72.