Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 53

Carrots

The best-tasting carrots I ever grew were an old-fashioned, non-hybrid variety called Autumn King. We grew them on top of a hill to avoid carrot root fly, scraping what little soil there was into ridges and sowing the seed on top. They grew slowly and steadily without irrigation or fertiliser until they hit the bed rock and then pushed themselves out of the ground, so that by November they stood several inches proud of the soil. Some of the carrots were over a foot long and weighed several pounds. They were harvested by hand and we had to stand some upright in the sacks because they were too long to lie crossways. It is interesting that when carrots are grown for processing, where flavour rather than cosmetic appearance is the main determining factor, this variety, or its modern-day cousins, is still grown commercially.

The carrot industry excels at growing and selling carrots that are cheap, cosmetically perfect and consistently tasteless. Over the last 20 years the drive to reduce costs has concentrated the industry in the hands of three or four large players with land in the east of England and southern Spain, supplied with seed by two or three international seed companies and all fighting for contracts with four major supermarkets. Carrots are lifted, sifted, sorted and washed; polished, packed, cooled and distributed to shelves around the country with extraordinary speed and efficiency 52 weeks of the year.