Although the carrot gets its name from an ancient Greek source, the ancients did not cultivate it as a kitchen vegetable, consuming the wild variety only occasionally as an aphrodisiac. Prior to the sixteenth century, carrots were also not eaten as food in England, although women did use their fern-like leaves as hair decorations. In fact, before the sixteenth century, the carrots that grew wild in England were not even called carrots: they were sometimes called clapwype, a word of unknown origin, now fortunately obsolete; and other times they were called dauk, a word that derived from a Latin name for some sort of plant similar to the carrot or parsnip. As they came to be cultivated in England in the early sixteenth century, carrots acquired their present name, which derives from the Greek word for the vegetable, karoton. In turn, karoton derives from the Greek word kara, meaning head, because the orange head of the vegetable pokes above the soil. The carrot was not, however, always orange: until the mid nineteenth century when horticulturalists began to cross-breed it, the root of the carrot was yellow. An even stranger fact is that the Oxford English Dictionary describes the root as now being “bright red.”
This passage is describing a root vegetable that has been known since Elizabethan times and is available year-round. This vegetable is called a carrot, and there are two main types: long-rooted and shorter or round-rooted. Carrots are commonly used to add flavor to stews, casseroles, and soups, or they can be cooked in various ways to be served as a vegetable. Additionally, carrots can be grated and eaten raw in salads. Carrots are an excellent source of vitamin A, in the form of carotene, and also contain some B vitamins, calcium, and sugar.