Cooking with carrots
Carrots are now called karrotti in Maltese, but the old word zunnarija continues to be used among older people in rural areas. This comes from the Arabic word pronounced sufunaria, and a similar word is used for carrots in Sicily. The parsnip, or zunnarija bajda, is no longer grown in Malta and plays no part in Maltese cuisine. Recent imports have led to a certain degree of curiosity about this root vegetable, which is a staple of northern European and English cuisine, served roasted or cooked in stews.
The carrots we eat (Daucus carota) are the domesticated variety of a common weed, the wild carrot – known in Maltese as zunnarija salvaġġa, and in English as Queen Anne’s lace because of its white lace-like flowers. It grows everywhere in the countryside. The root is tiny, and bears no resemblance to the edible carrot. Garden carrots that run to seed quickly revert to their wild prototype.
The orange colour of carrots is caused by the strong presence of carotene, a pro-vitamin which is stored in the liver and converted to vitamin A when the body needs it.
The general cultivation of carrots in England began no earlier than the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century. Shakespeare mentions carrots appreciatively in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The edible part of the carrot is its taproot. This stores large amounts of sugars which gives the plant the energy to flower.
Together with onion and celery, carrots are the basis for most broths.
The ‘baby’ carrots sold ready to eat in supermarkets are not a miniature carrot cultivar, but are carved uniformly out of ordinary large carrots.
Carrots can be grouped into two broad classes: eastern carrots and western carrots. Eastern carrots were first domesticated in central Asia, probably in the area of modern-day Afghanistan. The surviving varieties are purple or yellow, and often have branched roots. The first of the western carrots emerged in the Netherlands in the 15th or 16th century. They were orange. They are shown in Dutch master paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries. Not all western carrots are orange. There are white, yellow, red and purple ones, but orange has become the classic carrot in the west.
Western carrots are classified by their root shape. Imperator carrots have long roots which taper to a point. Nantes carrots are nearly cylindrical, and blunt or rounded at the top and tip. Danvers carrots are conical. Chantenay carrots are short and wide.
Children used to be told that carrots would help them see in the dark. Lots of older people still believe that carrots can improve your eyesight. The simple truth is that lack of vitamin A can cause eyesight to deteriorate, but putting vitamin A back into the diet will restore vision.