Wild carrots are indigenous to Europe and known as Queen Anne’s Lace, as well as Devil’s Plague, and Fool’s Parsley, this wild carrot variety was known primarily for its use as an herb and in medicinal recipes. The formal, cultivated carrot arrived in England by the 15th century, and right up until Shakespeare’s lifetime, carrots were mostly purple. According to the Wild Carrot Museum in the UK, orange colored carrots arrived in Europe right in the middle of Shakespeare’s lifetime, making the orange carrot a new thing for Shakespeare. In fact, one reason orange carrots are thought to have caught on so quickly in popularity is because cooking the orange carrots didn’t stain the pots nearly as bad as cooking with purple ones. The new carrot took a firm hold in the cultivation of this root vegetable and by the time British settlers arrived in North America, the carrots they brought with them were primarily orange and sometimes white. When it comes to finding carrots in Shakespeare’s plays, the word “carrot” isn’t in there. We can only partially fault Shakespeare for not giving us a nice reference to carrots for this week’s episode because the word “carrot” was just getting started in the English language. “Carrot” arrived in English around 1530, but in popular vernacular, there was a great deal of overlap between the names for root vegetables. Carrots, parsnips, and parsley were often referred to interchangeably by the same names. In fact, in Old English, there’s not a good way to distinguish between carrots and parsnips, since they were both called “moru” coming from the, fittingly, root word for “edible root.” 

 

Our guest this week is an expert in historical horticulture and he joins us today to help us understand what Shakespeare would have called this orange root vegetable, whether or not it was a regular at the dinner table, and to explain the history of what kind of carrots Shakespeare would have enjoyed. 

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