Purple Carrots, and the Political Origin of the Orange
I thought it was a gimmick. A joke. Purple carrots, die neue Möhrensorte; just 99 cents a bag at our local Extra. Maybe they’ve even been there forever, and I just haven’t noticed them before this week.
Turns out they’re quite serious, older in fact than orange carrots, and genuinely tasty. The Brits among you may be more familiar with these; I see from an old BBC article that they landed on UK shores a half-decade ago. I think they’re in some farmer’s markets in the States too, but certainly not in any grocery store I’ve ever seen. And I’ve certainly never cooked with them.
As you can see from the picture, die Möhre Violett or purple carrot is a dark, huckleberry color around its outside, with a more traditional orange core. The protesteth-too-much bag advertises them as sweet, crispy, and offering a “saftiges Aroma;” and indeed, we found them to be slightly sweeter than the ordinary variety, and if a little woody, then no more so than any other supermarket carrot here.
According to the excellent online Carrot Museum (of course there is one, it’s the Internets), carrots at least as far back as Roman times were either purple or white. By the 14th century, traders from around the world had brought a regular rainbow of black, violet, red, yellow and white roots to Southern European shores.
So where’s the orange come from? Get this – in the mid-1500s, a group of nationalist Dutch agriculturists wanted to create a veggie product that would honor their ruling House of Orange. A bit of pale yellow and red cross-breeding later, they got the relatively sweeter, beta-carotene rich version we all know and love today.
Years later, we’re back to the beginning, with the Möhre Violett at a grocery store, or at least an Extra, near you. But a word of warning: as with beets, the color spreads. On a salad, they’re a beautiful splash of slightly sweet, raw color. Cooked for a while in a soup, what you get is gray-purple broth that looks like something out of a Dickens novel.
JB
Tags: carrots, market, vegetableRelated posts
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