CARROTS

It may be as well to remind yourself while reading what follows that this is a serious and relatively sober account of the goodness that comes from the Fenland soil -- and NOT one of those e-mails that clutter up your inbox with promises of Viagra-like enhancements to your love life!

For the carrot is one more vegetable that has been endowed with a racy history. They were known to both the Romans and the Greeks, the latter calling the vegetable philtron, barely a linguistic step away from (love) philtre. The carrot they claimed 'made men more ardent, and women more yielding'.

The ones in our picture are local -- albeit from Watton which lies in Breckland rather than Fenland. They're a vegetable like the parsnip where it has become fashionable to sell them unwashed, with the earth still on them. Regular readers who have become accustomed to the sense of humour of our correspondent will probably sense a rather bad joke about 'Watton earth' scampering around in the background. Also, more recently, there has been a fashion for selling them with the greenery still attached. Unlike, say, the brussel sprout stalk where the stalk continues to supply nutrient to the plant, these tops offer nothing to the carrot, beyond the reassurance that they're fresh, as the greenery will wilt fairly fast.

It's rare these days to see carrots in any other colour than orange -- indeed 'carrotty' has become a colour description. But they have been grown in purple, black, yellow and white varieties. Healthwise, they're a source of vitamins A (derived from carotene which is basically the orange pigment), B and C. They contain folic acid, magnesium, thiamine, potassium and calcium pectate which has cholesterol-lowering properties. This is all pretty remarkable, as the carrot is 87% water!

There is of course the well-known (and possibly apocryphal) story of carrots helping you to see in the dark. It is even documented that during World War II the RAF carefully fed disinformation to the Germans that British fighter pilots were as accurate as they were because of the carrots they were fed on -- a neat move to distract the Germans from working out that we had radar!

Surprisingly, the carrot (which is first recorded in what is now Afghanistan, and followed the usual routes around India, China and Japan) is basically a development of a weed: known in the USA as Queen Anne's Lace.

But whatever your take on the 'humble' carrot, treat yourself to a visit to the World Carrot Museum -- that's a website, not a place. Even if you can't stand the vegetable, we guarantee that you will be entertained: www.carrotmuseum.co.uk

 

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