How Carrots Won the Trojan War Read online

  Most eaters, unlike Bart, Alexander, and me, find them scrumptious. Eliza Leslie, in her Directions for Cookery, In Its Various Branches (1840), declares limas “the finest of all the beans.” Frances Trollope, a visiting English author who loathed everything on the continent, including the American view of Niagara Falls, declared lima beans “a most delicious vegetable: could it be naturalized with us it would be a valuable acquisition.”

  Hands-down most spectacular of the cultivated American beans is the scarlet runner, P. coccineus, which was first domesticated in Central America and Mexico. Nicknamed “painted lady” for its gorgeous and gaudy flowers, the scarlet runner was first adopted by Europeans as an ornamental. It was grown in sixteenth-century England as “garden smilax,” so called because, as it climbs, it twines counterclockwise like smilax or honeysuckle. John Gerard grew it in his garden, on decoratively positioned poles, although it was equally popular over the “arbors of banqueting places” to lend a note of glorious color to the upper-class picnic. In Germany it was known as Feuerbohne or “fire bean.” Thomas Jefferson reports planting some in 1812 on the “long walk” of the garden as “Arbor beans, white, crimson, scarlet, purple.”

  Gambling aside, we all know the real problem with beans.

  P. acutifolius, the tepary bean, is the ancient Phaseolus of the American Southwest. The tepary is a rapid grower, notably resistant to drought, ideally suited to the hot, dry climates of western Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. It was domesticated in Mexico at least by 5000 BCE and was intensively cultivated by the Hopis, who deliberately selected for the widest possible range of colors: yellow, tawny, brown, garnet, blue-black, white, and speckled. Tepary beans, before the advent of the playing card and the poker chip, figured as counters in an ancient Indian gambling game.

  Gambling aside, we all know the real problem with beans. Both Old and New World beans — and, to be fair, bran, onions, cucumbers, raisins, cauliflower, lettuce, coffee, and dark beer — have a reputation for eliciting a condition known delicately in the sixteenth century as “windinesse.” Flatulence, for much of human history, has been a pressing social concern: Robert Burton, in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, lists sixty-four proposed remedies for sufferers. The embarrassing aftereffects of bean eating are due to an assortment of oligosaccharides — short chains of two to ten linked sugars — which the body is unable to break down into metabolizable form. The bacteria of the lower intestinal tract, however, can digest these tidbits just fine, producing in the process an accumulation of bloating gas.

  One possible solution to the bean problem is to nuke the beans. Jammala Machaiah and Mrinal Pednekar, researchers in the food science laboratory at the Bhaba Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay, India, have found that zapping beans with low-intensity gamma rays eliminates up to 80 percent of the pesky oligosaccharides. Another method — the recipient of U.S. Patent No. 6,238,725 in 2001 — involves soaking and boiling, though not in the helter-skelter manner as performed in the average kitchen, but under carefully calibrated conditions involving mathematical formulae.

  While hardly the pinnacle of social acceptability, flatulence is not ordinarily dangerous — except perhaps in the case of a Roman aristocrat under the emperor Claudius who reportedly endangered his health by embarrassed retention. Other bean components can be much nastier.

  Foremost among the evils are the cyanogens, harmless sugar complexes that in the presence of a specific enzyme are cloven to release cyanide, an effective and deadly inhibitor of the respiratory system. Cyanogens are found in the seeds of apples, pears, peaches, and apricots, as well as in lima and kidney beans — the last two owing their appealing flavor to a soupçon of cyanide. Wild beans are generally higher in cyanogens than are their cultivated relatives, and some cultivated varieties have more poisonous potential than others. The colored lima beans, for example, of the sort popular in early Peru, contain up to thirty times the cyanogen concentration of the all-white lima beans grown today.

  * * *

  Red Wine, Chocolate — and Beans

  Air isn’t good for us. Breathe it long enough, points out Nick Lane, author of Oxygen: The Molecule That Made the World (2002), and it inevitably does us in. Oxygen is a killer.

  The culprits here are a class of sinister oxygen off shoots called free radicals — highly reactive molecules with itchy unpaired electrons. Free radicals are products of normal body metabolism — each one of our body’s cells generates 20 billion of them a day — and they’re also found floating around in the environment, constituents of air pollutants and cigarette smoke. Left to themselves, free radicals — like tiny gobbling Pac-men — destroy cellular integrity and wreak havoc with DNA.

  Our bodies ordinarily fight free radicals off with a pair of antioxidant enzymes, catalase and superoxide dismutase (rudely abbreviated as SOD). Over time, however, our lifelong accumulation of free radicals overwhelms our normal defenses. Free-radical-induced damage has been implicated in cardiac disease, long-term memory loss, macular degeneration, and cancer. One theory of aging holds that it’s all the fault of free-radical-generated oxidative stress.

  We can beat free radicals off, however — with food. Red wine, dark chocolate, green tea, fruits, and vegetables are all — in varying degrees — rich sources of protective antioxidants such as vitamins E and C, carotenoids, and flavonoids. The total antioxidant content of a food is determined by ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) analysis — a test-tube test that determines how effectively various foods can block the oxidative destruction of a fluorescent test molecule. In theory, the higher the ORAC score, the better, though in actual practice there are variations depending on whether a food is raw, boiled, baked, steamed, or juiced.

  Top of the list, according to a 2004 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) study: blueberries, artichokes, apples, potatoes, and red beans.

  * * *

  Along with cyanogens, bean seeds contain protease inhibitors — complex protein molecules that interfere with the enzymatic processes of digestion — and lectins, which bind to sugar receptors on the surfaces of intestinal cells, with ensuing ill effects. Black turtle beans, for example, contain a hefty dose of the toxic lectin phytohemagglutinin, which induces a lethal clotting of the blood. Luckily, both cyanogens and phytohemagglutinin are defused by cooking, which means there’s no need to fear black bean soup. Perhaps, as one anthropologist suggests, cooking developed in the first place to detoxify the otherwise irresistibly nutritious seeds of wild legumes.

  Such piddling negatives as poisons, however, are hardly enough to put a dent in the popularity of beans. In comparison to the egg — the acknowledged ne plus ultra of human foods — beans pack 34 percent as much protein, and they’re a whole lot easier to carry. Daniel Defoe’s stranded Robinson Crusoe, discovering a “parcel of money” in gold and silver on his desert island, is thoroughly dismayed: “I would have given it all for a sixpenny-worth of turnip and carrot seed out of England, or for a handful of peas and beans, and a bottle of ink.”

  “Not worth beans” has meant “utterly valueless” since the thirteenth century, which shows that, historically, we haven’t had a clue as to the value of beans. A lot of us are here only because of them.

  Chances are, even you and me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In Which

  BEETS MAKE

  VICTORIAN

  BELLES BLUSH

  plus

  The Smell of Rain, Charlemagne’s

  Christmas List, A Clever Use of Wine

  Lees, A Recipe for Longevity, and

  An Infamous Doctor

  The beet is the most intense of vegetables.

  TOM ROBBINS

  A lot of us don’t like beets.

  According to an AOL food preference poll of 2008, beets are among Americans’ top ten most-hated foods. They were seventh in awfulness, to be exact, which means they were less loathed than liver (the worst of the worst), lima beans, mayonnaise, mushrooms, eggs, and okra, but were definitely mo
re despised than Brussels sprouts, tuna fish, and gelatin.

  Just 11 percent of home gardeners grow beets. Among the beetless majority is the White House: no beets were planted in 2009 in the White House organic vegetable garden because President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle can’t stand them. Irwin Goldman, master beet researcher and professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, estimates that just 8,000 acres of land in the United States are devoted to growing beets — we use more for turnips (11,500 acres), radishes (14,600), and macadamia nuts (17,800) — and the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) barely bothers to track them.

  The problem with beets, beet-haters say, scrunching up their noses and making “blech” expressions, is their taste. Beets, they claim, taste like dirt. And they do, actually, although most beet aficionados prefer the term “earthy.” The crucial chemical that gives beets their distinctive flavor is the same substance that makes the garden smell so good after a rain. Called geosmin, it’s officially a terpene — one of a vast class of hydrocarbon molecules that also puts the tang in turpentine and the zip in hops. In nature, geosmin is produced by a number of microorganisms, including blue-green algae and soil bacteria.

  People are surprisingly sensitive to it. We can detect geosmin in nanogram quantities — that is, in amounts as low as ten parts per trillion. In very tiny doses, geosmin can be a flavor plus. (One optimistic wine seller compared the touch of it in his vintage to dried apricots.) Too much of it, however, makes water, wine, catfish, and beets taste like mud, and, though it won’t actually hurt us, we don’t like it.

  The garden beet, Beta vulgaris, is said to get its formal name from the Greek letter beta, because the swollen root more or less resembles a Greek B. Less is more like it: as any casual student of the Greek alphabet can plainly see, the average beet looks a lot more like an omicron ( ), theta ( ), or even a lower-case sigma ( ) than a beta. However, Carl Linnaeus — the father of modern taxonomy — swallowed it, and then assigned the beta-shaped beet to the Goosefoot family (Chenopodiaceae), so called because the leaves of some of the more prominent members resemble the flat flappy feet of geese.

  In 2003, however, following extensive morphological and phylogenetic analyses, modern taxonomists demoted the chenopods from family status, and incorporated them into the previously somewhat puny family Amaranthaceae, thus nearly tripling its size. Beet relatives now include some 2,400 species, among them the potherbs Good-King-Henry and lamb’s-quarters; leafy garden spinach; quinoa, a chenopod used by natives of the high Andes to make porridge and beer; and tumbleweed or Russian thistle, a pest in the American West, immortalized in song (“Driftin’ along with the tumbling tumbleweed”) in the 1940s by the Sons of the Pioneers.

  Botanists recognize three subspecies of beets: B. vulgaris ssp. vulgaris, which includes the familiar fat red beetroot, the sugar beet, and the outsized mangel-wurzel; B. vulgaris ssp. cicla, the leaf beets or chards; and B. vulgaris ssp. maritima, the uncivilized sea beet, a native of the coasts of Europe and the Middle East, believed to be the ancestor of all modern domesticated varieties.

  The oldest of cultivated beets were probably the chards, which have nothing remarkable in the way of roots, but are eaten much like spinach, for the leaves. The ancient Greeks, said to have offered chard on silver platters to the god Apollo, referred to the leafy beet as teutlion because, according to science writer Stephen Nottingham, its foliage resembled squid tentacles. Whatever it looked like, it was healthy stuff: a cupful of cooked greens provides an entire adult daily requirement of vitamin A.

  Pliny the Elder, who ate his beets as leaves, spoke slightingly of the “crimson nether parts” as the preserve of doctors and druggists.

  The Romans were the first to develop beets with bulbous roots, though initially these were used only as medicine. Pliny the Elder, who ate his beets as leaves, spoke slightingly of the “crimson nether parts” as the preserve of doctors and druggists. His Natural History lists twenty-four remedies based on beetroot: soaked in water, beets were good for “the stings of serpents”; boiled and eaten with raw garlic, they were used to treat tapeworm. Beet juice cured headaches and vertigo, or, injected into the ears, tinnitus; and various decoctions were used for ulcers, pimples, erysipelas, chilblains, toothache, and — peculiarly — both constipation and diarrhea. The food-loving author of Apicius (De Re Coquinaria), however, lists at least two recipes for beetroot: in one, beets are boiled with leeks, cumin, coriander, and raisin wine; in another, they are pickled with vinegar, oil, and mustard seed.

  By the late eighth or early ninth centuries, beets were certainly being grown in northern Europe. Around that time they appear in Charlemagne’s Capitulare de villis — a lengthy imperial administrative directive, divided into helpful capitula, or chapters — that describes the makeup and management of the royal estates.

  No detail, apparently, was too small for the king. The Capitulare calls for annual accounting statements (at Christmas) from each of his many stewards, who were required to calculate total estate income, assess amounts of land under cultivation (both by “our own plowmen” and tenants), sum up stocks of pigs, turnips, mulberry wine, beer, and beeswax, and even note the number and nature of recorded poaching incidents.

  It sounds much like our annual required report to the Internal Revenue Service, and doubtless drove a lot of French stewards equally mad.

  Also included in the Capitulare is an extensive list of the flowers, herbs, fruit and nut trees, crop plants, and vegetables grown in the royal fields and gardens. Among these last are “Salads” (cucumbers, melons, lettuce, parsley, radishes, and celery), “Roots” (carrots, parsnips, onions, leeks, and garlic), and “Pot-herbs” (mint, chicory, endive, savory, cabbages, and beets). The inclusion of beets with the potherbs (not roots) suggests that Charlemagne’s was a leaf beet or chard; the bulbous bright red beetroot, known as the “Roman beet” or “Blood Turnip,” seems to have become common in European gardens only in the sixteenth century.

  The Elizabethans ate their beets boiled in stews, pureed and baked in tarts, and occasionally roasted whole in the embers. White beets seem to have been more common, and consequently less desirable, than red. In 1577, Thomas Hill, author of The Gardener’s Labyrinth, in which he supplies would-be horticulturalists with a lot of bizarre advice, addressed himself to unhappy white-beet growers: “To have the Beete growe redde, water the plant with redde Wine Lees.” Hill also included his personal technique for producing bigger beets, by placing a “broad Tile, potshearde, or some other thing of weight” on top of the developing stalk, which naturally makes one wonder about the state of the Hill family beet patch.

  “To have the Beete growe redde, water the plant with redde Wine Lees.”

  Red, in most plants, comes from anthocyanins, a class of red and purple pigments that puts the color in apples, grapes, and eggplants, and make roses red and violets blue. The beet, on the other hand — though relatively impervious to red wine lees — is made red by betalains, a class of brilliantly colored molecules peculiar to beets, bougainvillea, and the prickly pear cactus.

  Betalains, of which there are many, come in two major kinds: betacyanins, which are red and purple, and betaxanthins, which are yellow, orange, and gold. Betacyanins are what led nineteenth-century belles to use beet juice as rouge; and today betanin — the reddest of the betacyanin reds — is used commercially to color a wide range of products from sausages to Kool-Aid. Not everyone, incidentally, is able to metabolize betacyanin properly, which means that after an orgy of red beet eating, they pee pink.

  Beets are not only beautiful, but also beneficial. They’re rich in folic acid, a B-complex vitamin, and in free-radical-scavenging antioxidants, which prevent cell damage and combat aging. The Hebrew Talmud — a collection of rabbinical writings generally dated to 300–500 CE— presciently recommends eating beetroot for long life (along with drinking mead and bathing in the Euphrates River). Modern juice diet advocates claim that a daily dose of b
eet juice cleanses the body of environmental toxins, lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and colon cancer.

  Pro-beet claims, however — maybe the color inspires irrational passions — can be dangerously overblown. In the 1950s, for example, Hungarian physician Alexander Ferenczi reported miraculous success in treating assorted advanced malignant cancers with a quart of raw beet juice a day, a result that still — despite lack of medical backup — pops up all over the Internet. Most notorious of medicinal beet advocates, however, is certainly South Africa’s late health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, nicknamed “Dr. Beetroot” for her promotion of traditional but wholly ineffective beetroot, lemon, and garlic remedies in lieu of antiretroviral drugs as a treatment for AIDS.

  The European colonists toted beets across the Atlantic to North America, where both chard and beetroot, in red, white, and yellow, were well established by the eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson planted beets at Monticello; and Mary Randolph mourns that they “are not so much used as they deserve to be,” and recommends that they be boiled and served with salt fish.

  Amelia Simmons mentions them in American Cookery, casting in her lot with the red: “The red is the richest and best approved; the white has a sickish sweetness, which is disliked by many.”

  * * *

  Red as a Beet

  To turn as red as a beet has been a synonym for an embarrassed blush since colonial times — appropriate not only for the hot-faced hue, but because beet red, exactly like a blush, is impermanent. Betacyanins are water-soluble: used as fabric dye, beets produce an initial deep rosy red that, disappointingly, promptly comes out in the wash. Better are red beans, which dyers use to produce a rich red-brown, and better yet is madder, Rubia tinctoria, a sprawling perennial of the same plant family as coffee and quinine. The British red coats were dyed red with madder root, as were the beet-red stripes in Betsy Ross’s famous flag.