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Vegetables: Plants
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James Peterson's Vegetables is an encyclopedic yet easy-to-read guide to preparing everything from artichokes and beet greens to plantains and watercress. It contains more than 300 enticing recipes, many which use just three or four ingredients.
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The Carrara Herbal (British Library, Egerton MS 2020), created sometime before 1403, was one of the first late medieval herbals to depict plants and vegetables accurately, although it may have been based on a now lost Byzantine prototype. Such illustrated handbooks of health, as well as numerous herbals, offer a rich visual record of the sorts of vegetables deemed worthy for the table in that period. The beautiful gardens witnessed by travelers through the Latin East were now replicated in Italy but with the goal for reattaining a glorious Roman past. The Italian pleasure gardens of this period so impressed Casimir the Great of Poland that he installed one in Cracow during the 1360s, complete with cold frames for forcing Mediterranean vegetables. In short, the vegetable garden once again becomes an object of status.
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The vegetables that are commonly consumed in the United States today come from all over the world, but their true origins are not always known for certain. Scientists have a significant interest in uncovering this information... because of the possibility of finding other related vegetable varieties in the native area that could be used to help improve modern crops through breeding efforts. Via a variety of means, including exploration, archaeological evidence, diversity studies, and genetic evidence, many clues have been revealed regarding the native environments of certain vegetables, but others remain shrouded in mystery. Indeed, some crops have been domesticated so long that no known wild varieties exist. Nevertheless, with microscopes and sophisticated techniques, more information about the origin of plants is available than ever before. Consideration of the differences in chromosomal shape between species is an especially effective way of tracing the origins of vegetables.
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Most of the world's botanical vegetables are produced by shrubby or herbaceous plants and vines, but there are some vegetables derived from trees. One case in point is the horseradish tree (Moringa oleifera)... called "malungay" in the Phillipines. This is a small, soft-wooded tree native to India but cultivated throughout the tropics. It is named from the pungent root that is sometimes used as a substitute for the true horseradish (Armoracia lapathifolia) of the mustard family (Brassicaceae). The young, tender, mustard-favored leaves are eaten raw in salads and cooked as a tasty potherb. The cooked leaves are also placed in soups and curries.
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There are few surviving writings from the Greeks and Romans that do not mention food and vegetables in some manner. It is known from quotes and citations in works like the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus that many books on gardening and agriculture once existed but are now lost. Athenaeus himself lavished considerable attention on foodstuffs, none the least being vegetables. His interests ranged from toasted chickpeas (still a snack food in the Mediterranean) to the medical applications of beets and carrots as vermifuges or a good dish of cabbage to treat a hangover. He even cited the known varieties of lettuce, garlic, fava beans, and many other garden plants in an effort to differentiate which were the best from a connoisseur's point of view.
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This title should be limited to vegetables in a typical human diet--because to Australian koalas, the largest vegetable would most certainly be an enormous eucalyptus tree. The 1985 Guinness Book Of World Records (UK Edition) lists some of the record-breaking vegetables, including a 35 pound (16 kg) turnip, a 45 pound (20 kg) red cabbage, a 28 pound (13 kg) broccoli, a 52 pound (24 kg) cauliflower, a 25 pound (11 kg) lettuce, and a remarkable 124 pound (56 kg) cabbage six feet (1.8 m) in diameter. Although this giant cabbage cited in the Guinness Book seems unbeatable for the title of "World's Largest Vegetable," there are tropical yams belonging to the genus Dioscorea that may be 6 to 9 feet long (2-3 m) and weigh 150 pounds (68 kg) or more, although they are usually harvested at about 2-6 pounds. These yams are not to be confused with fleshy storage roots of red sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) of the Morning Glory Family (Convolvulaceae) which are ... called yams. True yams belong to an entirely different and unrelated plant family, the Dioscoreaceae.
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