Re: Are Carrots Period?

[edh@ascc01.ascc.lucent.com (Alfredo el Bufon)]

Poster: edh@ascc01.ascc.lucent.com (Alfredo el Bufon)

Lady Linneah Gordon writes, in part:
> [...] in the grocery store today.  They had a  booklet of fruits
> and veggies that listed the history of some.  It said that carrots
> were not widely eaten until the 1600's when the Dutch developed the
> wild plant into a larger-rooted version that made it worth eating.
>
> Any comments?

Charlemagne commissioned an inventory of all foodstuffs in Frankish
lands.  (I believe that this work is the reason that Charlemagne is
known to this day in German as "Karl der Grocer")  Carrots were
important enough to show up on that list, although, as others have
already mentioned, they weren't big and orange.

I understand that there is a plant called Queen Anne's Lace that
often grows wild in fields and roadsides that is in fact wild
carrot, with a root (like the common garden-variety carrot but
much thinner and with a white flesh) that is edible.  However,
there is another wild plant (I forget the name) with a similar
white compound flower and white taproot, that is poisonous.

-- Alfredo
 
Alfredo el Bufon
Elvegast, Windmaster's Hill, Atlantia
edh@ascc01.ascc.lucent.com
______________________________________

And of thir fair wlonkes, tua weddit war with lordis,
Ane wes ane wedow, I wis, wantoun of laitis.
    "The tretis of the twa mariit women and the wedo"
    William Dunbar (1460?-1520?) 

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