Carrot

A root vegetable, Daucus carota; no one seems to know exactly where carrots came from or when they were domesticated from wild plants. It's believed that the carrot originated in the country known today as Afghanistan, where it's thought to have been cultivated for millennia. The carrot is a biennial, which was bred to become an annual. The ancestor of the carrot we know today was a deep purple color, almost black. In Egypt, they still grow carrots with small, purple roots. Although already known in ancient times by the Romans, Greeks, Germans and Slavs and mentioned in texts as early as 500 BC, the carrot received very little notice in history and did not reach England until about the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The carrot is not even mentioned among the 90 edible plants in De Villis, which registered the names of plants in the gardens of the Emperor Charlemagne, even though the ancient Greeks and Romans used the wild carrot primarily for medicinal purposes.

The carrot was little appreciated as a food for centuries because, up until the Renaissance, it was yellow and tough with a woody heart. Little by little, its texture and taste improved, and even its appearance brightened with the emergence of orange coloration in the middle of the 19th century, thanks to the intervention of some French agronomists. When carrots traveled from Holland to England during the Elizabethan age, they became popular immediately. Shakespeare mentions the carrot in The Merry Wives of Windsor. And they were not just used as food. During the reign of James I, it was the fashion for ladies to wear carrot leaves as a headdress - the ladies thought the feathery, fern-like carrot leaves were so pretty that they used them for decoration in their hair.

There are more than 100 varieties of carrots today. They can be as small as a fingertip or as long as 3 feet (90 cm) and up to 21⁄2 inches (6 cm) in diameter. Carrots come in orange, white, yellow, mauve, purple and black and have unlimited uses, from appetizers to desserts. Carrot greens are very much appreciated by gourmets. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), scientists improved carrots to such a degree that they now have twice as much beta-carotene as they did in 1950.

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