Setting aside spuds and onions, the carrot is probably Britain’s top veg. Everyone loves a carrot, even small children. Supermarkets in particular like them, because they can chop half a carrot into mini batons, stick them in a plastic container and charge you loads for what has now become an upmarket 'snacking’ food.
Chances are, though, that your chopped-up carrot will be a common or garden variety, developed for bulk sales rather than taste. What you want to get your hands on is a heritage carrot, one that harks back to the days when carrots came in all sorts of colours and configurations and actually tasted – in that peculiarly sweet and intense way that one remembers from childhood – of carrot. Seeds from the earliest cultivars of carrots have been traced back to prehistoric dwellings in Switzerland, and carrots were included in a list of aromatic herbs grown in the royal garden of Babylon in the eighth century BC, but it wasn’t until the 15th century that they made an appearance, as pale yellow or purple roots, in Britain. It was even later that the first orange carrot appeared, recorded in Dutch paintings of the 17th century.
Orange is now the colour most firmly associated with carrots, a perception rooted deep in the brain of the average consumer, but one that Marks & Spencer, for one, wants to change. M&S is currently doing a lot of work with old-fashioned varieties of carrot, and has pages of photographs to prove it. It’s extraordinary to see the huge variety in carrot shape and colour, from white to purple via round, short and fat to long and spindly, now being produced in Britain.
One man who is producing some of these old-fashioned varieties is Stephen Jack. He grows his carrots on about 160 acres of rented farmland in and around Elgin in Inverness. This area is well suited to carrots – soil temperatures remain cooler for longer, right through to the spring, so that the risk of fungal disease is lower, and carrots stored in the soil retain their high quality. The Scottish crop is harvested every other day from the beginning of August to May. We’re off to look at Jack’s Christmas carrots, destined to be on the shelves at M&S in time for the carrot surge that happens in November/ December.
We drive through this glorious part of Scotland, a landscape of fields of stubble and dark plough, birch woods and pine, like a
Rowland Hilder watercolour, as local landmarks are pointed out: Cawdor, Shakespeare’s historically inaccurate setting for Macbeth, Loch Ness, where the monster lurks, the Spey, home to the double-handed fly rod, Tilda Swinton, who 'wanders around the town of Nairn a lot’, and Ben Wyvis, covered in snow from a recent early fall. Just out of Nairn, and now in the teeth of a brief snowstorm, we arrive at the Boath House Hotel, where Michelin-starred Charlie Lockley, Scottish Chef of the Year 2010, has spent the morning turning carrots into the kind of ambrosial food not usually associated with this prosaic veg. One dish he has invented, tea-smoked roe deer with carrots baked in orange juice and star anise, is a revelation – simple, unexpected.
From Stephen Jack’s point of view, the sooner the public is converted to different-coloured carrots, the better. He has fields of them, grown over a 50-mile radius from his packing shed by Inverness airport. He started growing vegetables 20 years ago, having made the decision to switch from dairy farming (getting up at 3am every morning) to crops (7am every morning), but 10 years ago decided to concentrate on carrots, and now grows 15-20 varieties. 'There’s room,’ he thinks, 'for a bit of innovation in carrots – we’re trying to find better flavoured carrots with a better shape and colour.’
Next year, thanks to a grant from the Nuffield Trust, he is off to study carrot growing in China and America, where they grow lots of them. But for now, he and fellow carrot enthusiasts are in a field of yellow bunch and honeysnax – daft names but delicious to taste – carrots that, lifted today, will be on the shelves 48 hours later. These are organic fields, and have the character of highly fashionable meadows: undulating feathery drills of carrots, three abreast, strewn about with late poppies and the occasional bolted plant that has shot forth tall stems of carroty cow parsley. Clouds the colour of slate are massing in the east, but the carrots pulled from the ground, and cleaned in a silver bucket carried for that purpose by a Jeevesian agronomist named Peter (a consultant who is developing heritage varieties of carrots), are bathed in winter light and glow like red and yellow gold.
These are the kinds of carrots that the prosperous 15th-century landowner would have been having for his supper. Now you can, too, though for once in these straitened times, you don’t have to be rich to join in.
- Stephen Jack’s carrots are available at M&S stores. The Boath House Hotel, Auldearn, Nairn (01667-454896; boath-house.com)