purple is the new (old) orange

[piranha]

so, apparently the first domesticated carrots date 5000 years back, to afghanistan. and they were purple. orange didn't come into favour until the 17th century in the netherlands (maybe the House of Orange had something to do with that).

our first week at the farmer's market, we bought a small bunch of these. they embrace the power of "and", *grin*. the vendor didn't know anything other than that they were "heritage carrots". a bit of googling leads me to believe they're probably Purple Dragon. funny; a dragon yesterday, and today one too. (i am easily amused.) purple carrots allegedly are even better for you than the orange ones, they contain anthocyanin, which is an antioxidant.

the paramour is at siggraph. i need to decide soon whether i want to go too. despite feeling better i'm not feeling particularly social, and masses of people are not an attractant, so i probably won't go. that's good too, because i've been productive and can use the time to get some things done that totally fell through the cracks last year.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

Oh, awesome! Have you found fresh_haul? It exists for these kinds of posts.

[piranha]

no -- thanks for the pointer! yum.

[red_trillium]

I have grown some rainbow carrots last year but they didn't get very big. They were tasty and the purple ones were orange on the inside. :)

[piranha]

yeah, these ones are relatively small too; like fingerlings. there's a huge variety in size even just among orange ones, all the way from little spheres to really long ones. i couldn't honestly detect a taste difference but i had no orange ones around to try them next to each other. the vendor said these are slightly sweeter, but eh, i dunno. their skin was really thin though and didn't taste bitter.

[red_trillium]

I think mine all tasted about the same, except maybe the white ones tasted more "carroty" if I remember right.

The purples cook into orange I think as well.

[redbird]

I bought orange, purple, and yellow carrots one week at the farmers' market, because I thought it would be cool to do a mixed-color carrot dish. Peeled, they were all about the same color, and they all tasted about the same. (I know some people eat very young carrots with the peel on; I haven't tried that comparison.)

[piranha]

that must have been disappointing. these have a thick layer of purple most of which remains when peeled. and i've seen pictures yesterday when i was looking it up of carrots that are purple all the way through. when i was young, i remember the top of our orange carrots turning purple when exposed; that was only the skin though.

i usually peel the skin of mature carrots because it's bitter, but these seemed mature but had different skin; i just scrubbed them a bit (to get root hairs off) and ate them that way -- not bitter.

[wild_irises]

I just read somewhere (the infamous somewhere) that carrots used to be white. But I didn't know they were originally purple.

[piranha]

wild carrots are white. the wide colour variety in domesticated ones (white, yellow, orange, red, purple, almost-black) is really interesting (not so common). there are also some accounts from gardeners who've pulled up a purple bunch among usually orange ones. i also remember from my childhood that our orange carrots turned purple when the top was exposed; only the part that was above the ground though. i couldn't find anything about what role the colour gene(s) have.