The Color of Carrots

Carrots are immediately identifiable by their bright orange color at the farm stand or market, but did you know carrots weren’t always orange? The first domesticated carrots were purple and were grown in central Asia for centuries before they spread westward.

Purple carrots spread gradually to the lands around the Mediterranean, and yellow carrots, also of Eastern origin, were grown in Roman gardens. Red and white carrots, which were likely mutants of purple and yellow carrots, also became popular later, as the carrot spread through Europe.

But how did the more well-known orange carrot develop? For a long time, it was thought that orange carrots were a fairly recent innovation, dating from about the sixteenth century, when they were then carefully selected and bred to achieve the orange color, probably in the Netherlands. But much-older manuscripts from the Byzantine world have turned up with illustrations of orange carrots, so it is likely they were propagated along with purple carrots in Asia centuries earlier.

The Long Orange Dutch cultivar, developed in Hoorn, Netherlands, is generally considered the progenitor of all modern, western orange carrot varieties, which often have “Horn” in their names, such as Early Scarlet Horn.

The Emperor Charlemagne’s records list carrots among the vegetables grown in his royal gardens. Carrots reached England in the 15th century, and the Spanish introduced them as crops in South American not long after that. Carrots were grown in the first European settlement in North America, in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and when the English began to colonize Australia in the eighteenth century, they brought carrots with them there, too.

There’s a World Carrot Museum, at least online, at www.carrotmuseum.com, and it has some recipes posted if you are looking for a way to prepare the colorful carrots that were in some shares last Saturday.