The word broccoli is a corruption of the Latin brachium, which means "strong arm" or "branch"; Roman farmers referred to this vegetable as "the five green fingers of Jupiter." Although broccoli became popular in America in the mid-20th century, it arrived a long time before. Thomas Jefferson is credited for bringing the seeds from Italy to his bountiful garden at Monticello. But aside from some Italian immigrant families who brought "broccali" seed from the Old Country to grow in their backyard gardens, this delicious vegetable was almost unknown to the American public until the 1920s. The D'Arrigo Brothers, enterprising growers in Northern California's Santa Clara Valley, started shipping sample crates back east and promoting the "new" vegetable on that narrative apparatus, the radio. The demand increased rapidly, and, by the early 1930s, broccoli was both an established crop and an accepted part of the American diet. Calabrese or sprouting broccoli is a variety of broccoli with large, tightly packed blue-green flowers and a very delicate flavor, named after Calabria in Italy.
From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
