Carrot History Part Three - Evolution and Improvement

1800 to date

This page from 1800 to date   - Evolution and Improvement

History 1 - from early beginnings, Neolithic times to A.D. 200

History 2 - AD 200 to 1800 - From Medicine to Food

By the 1800's horticultural growers were producing roots of a colossal size. Some were two feet in length with a girth of twelve inches and weighing four pounds each. Carrots were widely cultivated in the walled gardens of country estates. Growers were continually experimenting with strains to create the perfect "show roots". Come the 19th century, carrots were widely grown and began their descent into the ordinary alongside onions and potatoes. This certainly was not a bad thing, as obviously some foodstuffs have to take the role as workhorse recipe ingredients. And carrots certainly do it well, whether it's the leading taste in a soup, cake or refreshing drink, or bit-player in stock, salad or stew.

Gentlemen in Teheran in the 1870's took carrots stewed in sugar as an aphrodisiac to increase the quality and quantity of sperm!

Joseph Banks the eminent botanist noted that carrots cultivated in Sandy, Bedfordshire were transported by mule to neighbouring areas, where growing conditions were less favourable.

All modern day carrots are directly descended from Dutch-bred carrots. The familiar vegetable with its thick sweet tasting root, comes from a natural variety of "Queen Anne's Lace" named Daucus Carota variety sativus (Sativus means cultivated) similar to dill, but with bright white umbrella - shaped flower clusters.  Learn all about the Wild Carrot - Queen Anne's Lace here.

This extract from the Kings American Dispensary in 1898 shows that a carrot poultice was recommended. "Preparation.-Take of garden carrots, scraped, 4 ounces, Indian meal (corn meal), 1 ounce, boiling water, a sufficient quantity to form a cataplasm of the proper consistence.  Action and Medical Uses.-This will be found a valuable application to indolent and gangrenous ulcers, and painful tumours."

The discovery of vitamins in the 19th century, and more particularly of vitamin A, increased the appreciation of the carrot in the every day diet, as it could help prevent night blindness. For this same reason, during the Second World War, British pilots were given large amounts of carrots in their diet. Vitamin A is also good for nails, hair and skin. It has been recognised as having proven nutritional properties from the very early days. See the Nutrition pages for more information.

The modern carrot came into being thanks to the efforts of French horticulturist, Vilmorin-Andrieux. Working with the common wildflower Queen Anne's lace, he produced fairly good garden types of carrot with fleshy roots and a biennial habit. He sowed seeds of the wild carrot rather late in the year around June and selections were made of a few roots which did not flower in the first season. The seeds from these produced plants which mainly lost their annual character and did not flower until the second season.

The largest and best formed roots were again selected and allowed to seed. The plants from this seed again showed improved habit and form. By continuing this selection of non- flowering roots with fleshy thickening, Mr Vilmorin (from Paris) cultivated and selected plants over a 4-year period, finally producing a plant with a thick fleshy root, some white, others yellow and red. All of these showed little tendency to "bolt" in the first season.

The Danvers carrot is a true American heirloom, originated from market gardens in Danvers, MA. and introduced in 1871

Twentieth Century

In 1905 Sears opened its seed department.

1939/45 During the Second World War the Carrot was widely used as a substitute for scarce commodities. It was also a major ingredient of the "Dig For Victory" Campaign.

In October 1939 Rob Hudson, Minister for Agriculture, announced "We want not only the big man with the plough but the little man with the spade to get busy this autumn... Let 'Dig for Victory' be the motto of everyone with a garden". It was a desperate request, for farmers could only produce 30% of the country's food. But if gardens could be turned over to growing food rather than flowers, up to 25% of the necessary vegetables could be provided

The programme was mirrored in the USA with the formation of Victory Gardens - scroll down or click here to see details.

The Ministry of Agriculture promoted carrots heavily as a substitute for other more scarce vegetables. To improve its blandness, people were encouraged to enjoy the healthy carrot in different ways by promoting various recipes such as curried carrot and carrot jam.

The Ministry of Food campaign to encourage people to eat more vegetables, resulted in the promotion of Woolton Pie, composed entirely of vegetables. Potato, carrot and swede provided the basic ingredients, with onion and cauliflower added when available.

 Read more about Woolton Pie - click here.

Carrots also provided the basis for a home made drink called Carrolade made up from the juices of carrots and Swede grated and squeezed through a piece of muslin.

Other culinary uses included carrot marmalade and toffee carrots.Like the potato even the humble carrot had been elevated to a new high.

Also during the war many thousands of tons were dehydrated and shipped overseas in sealed metal containers in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide or nitrogen to prevent loss of carotene.

In wartime Britain children would very often use the humble carrot as a substitute for the fruit they could no longer obtain. Similarly the Government also issued a poster with the slogan 'Carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout' to promote the humble carrot.

Sweets (candy) were scarce so children had to make do with whatever their inventive mums came up with. This wartime recipe for carrot fudge sounds really weird. Why not print it out and give it a try? You'll need a bit of grown-up help with the cooking. See if your friends can guess what it's made of and let us know how it tastes.

Carrot Fudge (Recipe from Colleen Moulding's "Frugal Recipes from Wartime Britain").

You will need:
4 tablespoons of finely grated carrot
1 gelatine leaf
orange essence or squash
a saucepan and a flat dish

Put the carrots in a pan and cook them gently in just enough water to keep them covered, for ten minutes. Add a little orange essence, or orange squash to flavour the carrot. Melt a leaf of gelatine and add it to the mixture. Cook the mixture again for a few minutes, stirring all the time. Spoon it into a flat dish and leave it to set in a cool place for several hours. When the "fudge" feels firm, cut it into chunks and get eating!

Let us hope that the country never faces such extremes again. However, it is now realised that the home population never ate so well as during and after the war. This was thanks to the strict rationing of shop-bought goods and the amount of fresh vegetables that people ate.

There is a simple message for the 21st Century's increasingly obese and under-exercised populations. Take up carrot growing and give up the car while you're at it!

In the USA - Victory Gardens

At the beginning of World War II, Secretary of Agriculture Wickard suggested that, since the farmers of America would be busy feeding the army, civilians should plant Victory Gardens to provide fresh vegetables for their own tables. Americans were quick to respond. By 1943, victory gardens were flourishing in many backyards, empty lots, parks, baseball fields, schoolyards - even parking lots, since not many cars were being driven due to the shortage of gasoline. These gardens came in every size and shape. Governments and corporations promoted the victory garden effort as a call for self-reliance.

People in both rural and urban areas tilled the soil to raise food for their families, friends and neighbours. Households used what they needed and preserved and canned for future use. Eventually more than 40 percent of the country's vegetables were grown in the nation's backyards. Victory gardening enabled more processed foods to be shipped to our troops around the world. Emphasis was placed on making gardening a family or community effort - not drudgery, but a pastime, and a national duty.

By 1944, 20 million Americans planted Victory Gardens, producing one million tons a year of vegetables -- about half the amount consumed in America.

Of course carrots figured highly in the campaigns, as evidenced by the various propaganda posters. Click here to see more posters.

Brightly coloured posters produced for the government by artists from the Work Progress Administration (WPA) encouraged Americans to "Fight with Food." Vegetables grown in home gardens, the government reasoned, would not only lighten the burden of food rationing, but would free up supplies needed for troops fighting in Europe. The appealing combination of self-sufficiency and patriotism made the Victory Garden effort arguably the most successful civilian wartime program.

The most common carrot varieties used by US citizens were Amsterdam Minicor and Autumn King

Also an extract of carrots was used in America to colour Oleos (margarine) during the fats rationing that took place during the second world war. (They were really reviving an early American folk custom in colouring foods.)

Carrots helped win World War Two!

The carrot myth  - World War Two pilots were fed excessive amounts of high carotene carrots to help them see in the dark and therefore spot Nazi airplanes quicker.

Facts:
• The First radar system was produced in 1935 by Sir Robert Watson-Watt

• By 1939, UK had radar stations all round the  south coast of the UK

• In 1940, John Cunningham was the first pilot to down an enemy using radar

• To cover-up the use of  radar from the Germans, pilots were praised for being able to see in the dark through a "secret" diet

• The government said it was because they ate carrots, rich in Vitamin A.

Read more:

In 1940 experiments with high carotene varieties were conducted to reduce night blindness in World War II pilots. These high carotene roots were very dry. With the advent of synthetically manufactured carotene, cultivation of these varieties ceased in 1947. In World War II, Britain's Air Ministry spread the word that a diet of carrots helped pilots see Nazi bombers attacking at night. That was a lie intended to cover the real matter of what was underpinning the Royal Air Force's successes: the latest, highly efficient on board,  Airborne Interception Radar, also known as AI. The secret new system pinpointed some enemy bombers before they reached the English Channel.

When the Luftwaffe's bombing assault switched to night raids after the unsuccessful daylight campaign, British Intelligence didn't want the Germans to find out about the superior new technology helping protect the nation, so they created a rumour to afford a somewhat plausible-sounding explanation for the sudden increase in bombers being shot down. British Intelligence instigated news in the British press about extraordinary personnel manning the defences, including Flight Lieutenant John Cunningham, an RAF fighter pilot dubbed "Cats Eyes" on the basis of his exceptional night vision that allowed him to spot his prey in the dark. In fact, in WW II, he was the RAF's top-scoring night fighter pilot, with a total of 20 kills. Cunningham's abilities were chalked up to his love of carrots.  The Royal Air Force bragged that the great accuracy of British fighter pilots at night was a result of them being fed enormous quantities of carrots and the Germans bought it because their folk wisdom included the same myth.

But this story was only a myth invented by the RAF to hide their use of radar, which was what really located the Luftwaffe bombers at night - not human carrot-assisted super-vision.

The disinformation was so persuasive that the English public to the extent that they started growing and eating more carrots, so that they could find they way around easier at night during the blackouts that were compulsory during WW II.

See the full story of "Cats Eyes" Cunningham here.

World War Two also produced a genuine Carrot plane! - read more here.

In the 1960's, like so many vegetables, carrots suffered under large-scale food production and industrial distribution methods, where taste was secondary to whether a vegetable could survive packaging and transport. It’s said that suppliers would drop sacks of carrots on the floor and the variety that remained in tact was the one chosen. This resulted in the death of old favourites, not least the Chantenay, which had a reputation as a hard carrot to grow. 

Luckily this variety has made quite a comeback because of its lovely sweet taste.
 

Because of this vegetable's inherent sweetness, it has been used for desserts and sweets long before the ubiquitous carrot cake. The Irish and English make a carrot pudding, the French make a cream with candied slivers of carrots in it, "tzimmes" a sweet carrot stew, is traditional for the Jewish New Year and early New Englanders gave carrot cookies as Christmas gifts. See the recipes page.

Are we amused now by the ancients' attaching such medical importance to the carrot? Why should we be? In America in the past 25 to 30 years the humble carrot has risen from an obscure root, considered mainly as a delicacy for horses, to a position of genuine importance as human food.

How did it happen? Our doctors and nutrition experts made us believe carrots are "good for us"; we know that varieties with a deep orange colour are rich in carotene, or provitamin A, found also in other yellow vegetables and in green leaves. Vitamin A is found in such foods of animal origin as fish-liver oils, butter, and egg yolks.

Perhaps the ancient Greeks were the real discoverers of the benefit of carrots in the diet. However, they did not know the reasons and lacked the teaching facilities used to induce us to eat our carrots. Carrots are as important a food to modern man as they were to our early ancestors. Because they are nutrient-dense, portable, delicious and versatile, they meet the needs of today's lifestyles and fit into today's dietary guidelines. Check out the Nutrition pages.

The popular carrot, in its orange colour, rules the western carrot world. There are literally hundreds of varieties to choose from. The most widely favoured are Autumn King and Early Scarlet Horn.

In China and Japan yellow and red varieties are very popular. The purple carrot is making a comeback and is proving popular in several American States.

Many countries are now marketing "rainbow" carrots, mixed bags of red, yellow, white, purple and orange carrots and this novelty attraction seems to be successful.

Modern selection and breeding now concentrates on producing strains with an even colouring, size and tender flavour. Greater resistance to bolting is also another aim of growers. Control over the serious pest, carrot fly seems to depend on the levels of phenolic acid in the roots. The carrot fly larvae appear to avoid strains low in acid content.

The cause of cavity spot was only discovered in 1980. Now identified as an infection caused by an air borne fungus (Pythium Volae). Another serious pest is Sclerotina Rot, also caused by a fungus. The black fruiting bodies over winter in the soil and germinate during the spring. At present there is no remedy for this affliction and all contaminated roots must be destroyed. Today there are hundreds of varieties to choose from. The most widely favoured variety must be "Autumn King" with the "Early Scarlet Horn" a close second.

Baby Carrots

A "true" baby carrot is a carrot grown to the "baby stage", which is to say long before the root reaches its mature size. These immature roots are preferred by some people out of the belief that they are superior either in texture, nutrition or taste. They are also sometimes harvested simply as the result of crop thinning, but are also grown to this size as a specialty crop. Certain cultivars of carrots have been bred to be used at the "baby" stage. One such cultivar is 'Amsterdam Forcing'.

"Manufactured" baby carrots are what you see most often in the shops - these are carrot-shaped slices of peeled carrots, invented in the late 1980's by Mike Yurosek, a California farmer, as a way of making use of carrots which are too twisted or knobbly for sale as full-size carrots. Yurosek was unhappy at having to discard as much as 400 tonnes of carrots a day because of their imperfections, and looked for a way to reclaim what would otherwise be a waste product. He was able to find an industrial green bean cutter, which cut his carrots into 5 cm lengths, and by placing these lengths into an industrial potato peeler, he created the baby carrot.

Today, Yurosek is a contented man, spending his days going sport fishing with his grandkids and trying to persuade his wife to make his favourite carrot recipe: her Bunny-Luv carrot cake. He says "When you've done something you're proud of and it's been acknowledged, it's a dream come true."

They are sold in single-serving packs with ranch dressing for dipping on the side. They're passed out on airplanes and sold in plastic containers designed to fit in a car's cup holder. At Disney World, burgers now come two ways: with fries or baby carrots.

Read the full Baby Carrot Story here. Digging the Baby Carrot.

The carrot is one of the most important vegetables in the western world.

The simple, wild tap root eaten by our Neolithic ancestors has come a very long way!.

Reference material is here.

Next Page - The Wild Carrot

History

Today

Nutrition

Cultivation

Recipes

Trivia

Fun

Authors

Cats

Links

Home