Carrots, Carrots, Carrots! Something fun for today!

The Carrot has a somewhat complex and unclear history, surrounded by doubt and enigma and it is difficult to pin down when domestication took place. The wide distribution of Wild Carrot (Daucus carota, carota), the absence of carrot remains in archaeological excavations and lack of documentary evidence do not enable us to determine precisely where and when carrot domestication was initiated. Over thousands of years it moved from a small, tough, bitter and spindly root to a fleshy, sweet, pigmented unbranched edible root.  It transformed from its seeds being used as a medicine or aphrodisiac to the root being eaten in many different dishes. Even before the introduction of domesticated carrots, wild plants were grown in gardens as medicinal plants.

Unravelling its progress through the ages is complex and inconclusive, but nevertheless a fascinating journey through time and the history of mankind. It is considered that Carrots were originally purple with a thin root, then a mutant occurred which removed the purple pigmentation resulting on a new race of yellow carrots. A tale, probably apocryphal, has it that the orange carrot was bred in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century to honour William of Orange. Though the stabilised and domesticated orange carrot does date from the sixteenth century Netherlands, it is unlikely that honouring William of Orange had anything to do with it!

Throughout the Classical Period and the Middle Ages writers constantly confused carrots and parsnips. This may seem odd given that the average carrot is about six inches long and bright orange while a parsnip is off white and can grow 3 feet, but this distinction was much less obvious before early modern plant breeders got to work. The orange carrot is a product of the 16th and 17th centuries probably in the Low Countries. Its original colour varied between dirty white and pinkish purple. Both vegetables have also got much fatter and fleshier in recent centuries, and parsnips may have been bred to be longer as well. In other words early medieval carrots and parsnips were both thin and woody and mostly of a vaguely whitish colour. This being the case, almost everyone up to the early modern period can perhaps be forgiven for failing to distinguish between the two, however frustrating this may be for the food historian.

Wild carrots have been present and used by Europeans since prehistoric times, but the garden carrot was unknown in Europe until the later Middle Ages. The Wild Carrot is the progenitor (wild ancestor) of the domestic carrot.  It is clear that the Wild Carrot and Domestic Carrot are the same species and both co-exist in the modern world. It is a popular myth that domestic carrot was developed from Wild Carrot, probably because of its similar smell and taste. Botanists have failed to develop an edible vegetable from the wild root and when cultivation of garden carrots lapses a few generations, it reverts to its ancestral type.  In 1866 French botanist  M Vilmorin claimed to have produced a viable, cultivated carrot from wild plants in four generations. The experiment was never repeated and it is thought that the "wild" plants used had previously been hybridized in nature with cultivated carrots. (Banga 1957)

Read the "rest of the story" here at the World Carrot Museum website
World Carrot Museum