Carrots Are Quite Remarkable Too

A carrot may be one of the most ordinary ingredients there is.

You can find one in almost every kitchen. In the refrigerator, in a crate of vegetables or already chopped and stored in a container for the mise en place. We use carrots in stocks, sauces, purées, salads and garnishes. Everyone knows them. Yet we almost never truly look at them.

A carrot is orange.

We take that for granted so completely that we rarely stop to ask why. But the carrot as we know it has not always looked this way. In fact, the first cultivated carrots were not orange at all.

They were mainly purple and yellow.

A Product That Prepares Itself

What I find beautiful about a carrot begins before we even pull it from the ground.

A carrot plant normally lives for two years. During its first year, it builds up a reserve beneath the soil. Sugars and other nutrients are stored in the root, giving the plant enough energy to grow, flower and produce seeds during its second year.

We almost always eat it before it reaches that second year.

What we call sweetness, juiciness and flavour is actually the energy the plant has stored for its own future.

I find that remarkable.

We see an ingredient. The plant sees a storeroom.

The Carrot Before Orange

The wild ancestors of our carrots were thin, pale, fibrous and probably much more bitter than the carrots we know today. They were not smooth, straight products that all fitted neatly into the same crate.

The earliest domesticated carrots for which we have reliable evidence appeared around 1,100 years ago in the region between Western and Central Asia. Think of present-day Iran, Afghanistan and the surrounding countries.

Those carrots were mainly purple and yellow.

From Asia, they slowly spread towards the Middle East and Europe. Wherever the carrot arrived, farmers continued cultivating the plants. They selected the carrots that were larger, sweeter, straighter or easier to store. Colour also played a role in that selection.

Over the centuries, countless local carrot varieties emerged.

Some were deep purple. Others were yellow, white or red. There were long, thin carrots, short, thick carrots and carrots that branched in several directions beneath the soil. Every region had its own growing conditions and, as a result, its own carrots.

It is sometimes claimed that hundreds of thousands of different varieties once existed. We cannot prove that number. Botanically speaking, most edible carrots even belong to the same subspecies. But their diversity was enormous.

The world of carrots once consisted of far more than orange alone.

How Do You Make a Carrot Orange?

Farmers at the time knew nothing about DNA. They did not understand genes and could not explain why one carrot turned purple while another became yellow.

But they could observe.

When a farmer pulled a carrot from the ground with a beautiful colour, a good shape or an exceptional flavour, he could decide not to eat it. The plant would be kept and allowed to flower the following year. Those flowers produced seeds, and those seeds were used to grow the next crop.

Then the same process began again. Observe. Taste. Select. Preserve. Generation after generation.

Among the yellow carrots, natural genetic changes probably produced plants that stored more orange pigment. Nature created the change. Humans noticed it and decided to continue with it.

By repeatedly selecting the most orange specimens, the colour became stronger and more reliable. Eventually, carrots emerged that passed their orange colour on to the generations that followed.

The carrot was not invented at a single moment. It was a process that took hundreds of years.

Why Its Colour Is So Intense

The orange colour is caused by carotenoids. Alpha-carotene and beta-carotene, in particular, play an important role. The more of these pigments a carrot stores, the deeper its orange colour can become.

Our bodies can convert some of the beta-carotene into vitamin A. As a result, the orange carrot also came to have significant nutritional value.

But that cannot have been the original reason farmers selected it. Orange carrots were already being cultivated in Europe during the sixteenth century. The relationship between carotene and vitamin A was not discovered until centuries later.

The farmers did not see vitamins.

They saw a striking carrot.

Perhaps they simply found the colour more beautiful. Perhaps certain orange carrots were sweeter, more reliable or easier to grow. It was probably a combination of flavour, yield, shape, shelf life and appearance.

There is no definitive answer.

That is exactly what I find so interesting. One of the best-known vegetables in the world acquired its most defining feature through a process whose original purpose remains uncertain.

Did the Dutch Make Carrots Orange?

According to the best-known story, Dutch farmers made carrots orange as a tribute to William of Orange and the House of Orange.

It is a compelling story.

Perhaps a little too compelling.

There is no convincing historical evidence that Dutch growers created an orange carrot specifically for William of Orange. The colour appears to have emerged in Western Europe during the Renaissance from older populations of yellow carrots. Dutch growers probably did play an important role in its development and distribution.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Netherlands excelled in agriculture, seed cultivation and international trade. Growers selected carrots that were not only beautifully orange but also grew uniformly and produced a good yield. By continuing to cultivate those plants, they developed increasingly stable varieties.

From the Netherlands and surrounding regions, the orange carrot spread throughout Europe. European colonists and traders then carried its seeds to other parts of the world.

Slowly, orange became the standard.

The connection with the House of Orange may later have increased the colour’s popularity. But claiming that the carrot was invented specifically for the Dutch royal family goes too far.

The truth is less simple. And because of that, it is actually more beautiful.

What Colour Does to Flavour

Colour does not automatically determine whether a carrot tastes good. A purple carrot does not necessarily taste better or worse than an orange one. The variety, the soil, the time of harvest and the way it is prepared are at least as important.

Yet colour does something to our expectations.

When I see a deep-orange carrot, I expect warmth and sweetness. From a purple carrot, I expect something earthy. A yellow carrot often looks softer and lighter. Before I have even tasted it, my mind has already created an idea of its flavour.

In the kitchen, you can play with that.

Raw, a carrot can be fresh, crisp and almost grassy. When roasted slowly, some of that raw character disappears and its sweetness becomes increasingly pronounced. The outside darkens. The inside softens. Given enough time, fat and salt, a simple carrot transforms into something completely different.

That is when a good ingredient becomes interesting to me.

Not when you do as much as possible to it, but when you understand what is already inside it.

My View of the Carrot

Perhaps the carrot is so beautiful precisely because it has become so ordinary.

We often devote a great deal of attention to expensive fish, exceptional meat or ingredients that are difficult to obtain. A carrot is less likely to receive that same attention. Yet behind this simple product lies a history of natural change, human selection, agriculture and flavour.

Thousands of years of development are contained within a single carrot.

Beneath the orange, its purple and yellow ancestors are still hidden. Not literally as colours that can be uncovered, but within its genetic history. The modern carrot still carries that ancient diversity with it.

To me, that makes it more than just an ingredient in a stock or a garnish.

A carrot shows what can happen when people continue to pay attention to a product for long enough. When they select, try again and improve it a little more each time.

Nature created the first change.

Humans continued the process.

And eventually, one of its many colours became so successful that we almost forgot a carrot could ever have been anything other than orange.