purple carrots

When any of us think of carrots, the first thing that comes to mind is a bright orange vegetable. But if you do some research into the history of carrots (I know, I'm a dork), you'll find that orange carrots are a relative novelty compared to  the other colors of carrots.

Remember when I wrote about yellow carrots? Until the 1600s, carrots were usually one of two colors: yellow, like I posted about before, and PURPLE.

The lighting is bad here... but these carrots were actually really dark! I got them from my CSA, and had first thought they must be a trendy new breed of carrots. Little did I know it's actually a very old strain!

A little internet sleuthing (supported by the Carrot Wikipedia page) tells me that orange carrots were cultivated in the Netherlands in the 1600s in honor of the House of Orange. Before that, any recipe that called for carrots either had white-ish, yellow, or purple carrots!

They taste just the same as orange carrots, but feel much more historic (ha ha). Here we enjoyed them raw in a salad.