Beet

A large, firm, edible root vegetable, Beta vulgaris, with an edible leafy top. Beets are of three colors and kinds: red, white and yellow. The white is mostly used in producing beet sugar, the red for culinary purposes and the yellow for feeding cattle. Beets have been eaten by humans since prehistoric time and are native to a wide swath of Eurasia from Britain to India. Both the Greeks and the Romans cultivated beets, mostly to use the roots, while other Europeans ate only the green tops. Besides eating them, the Greeks also used beets for medicinal purposes, such as a remedy for constipation. In some cases, the water in which the beets were boiled was added to wine gone sour to return it to its original taste and color. Columella, the early Roman agriculturist, noted in the 1st century AD that "This curious plant owes its name, Beta vulgaris, to a physical resemblance to the second letter of the alphabet." From the 16th century, the English and Germans consumed the red beet, or garden beet, while the white beet was used as forage for animals.

The beet consists mostly of a swollen hypocotyl, or lower stem, although it's partly a root. The beets we know today were developed from a wild, slender-rooted species that was common in Southern Europe, especially in sandy soil along the sea. The beets more commonly grown now, with large, round, red roots, are fairly modern as vegetables go, and only a few varieties were available as recently as 100 years ago. The ability to metabolize the bright red pigment betacyanin (an anthocyanin, extremely soluble in water and the same pigment found in grapes) is controlled by a single genetic locus. Those people who have inherited two recessive genes pass the pigment in their urine. The slightly blue hue of the root before cooking makes it "bleed", meaning the purple sap of the beet starts to ooze on contact with water. This characteristic is exploited in the making of borscht, a soup originally from Eastern Europe, which can range from a fairly thin consistency to a very thick blend with the beets finely cut in order to imbue the soup with as much color as possible. When handling cooked beets, a little lemon juice will easily remove the red stain from your fingers.

In the 18th century, a white variety of beet began to be cultivated for sugar production. Up to 8 percent of its weight is sugar, an exceptional figure for a vegetable. In 1757, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, a French chemist of Prussian origin, identified the sugar extracted from beets to be similar to the sugar extracted from sugarcane, hence the name "sugar beets." In 1793, in Berlin, François Achard perfected a process for producing sugar from beets; he revealed the process that year at Kunern, in Silesia. Benjamin Delessert, head of the Bank of France, saw the possibilities in beet sugar for sugar-starved France during the English blockade. He set up huge factories for producing sugar at Passy about 1810. Delessert installed modern steam engines (invented by James Watt only 40 years before) and developed ways to strain the molasses and crystallize the sugar. Napoleon Bonaparte visited the factories, honored Delessert and ordered sugar beets planted on great stretches of land in the north of France. Delessert's factories turned out more than 8 million pounds (4 million kg) of sugar in two years, but when Napoleon's empire fell at Waterloo and cane sugar came in from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Brazil, the price of sugar dropped by one-third. Beet sugar was not commercially practical again until the late 1870s, when a new production process and more efficient mills were developed. When these were demonstrated at the Paris World's Fair of 1878, almost every European country hurried to plant sugar beets and build facilities for sugar making. In terms of botany, the development of the sugar beet surpasses any other achievement of human ingenuity in food creation.

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