Raw carrots, cooked carrots, carrot cake...

Over the last three months, Tom and I have eliminated sweets as a regular part of our eating. I still love sweets (indeed I do), but we came to realize that we needed to make some changes in our diet for the good of our health.

As Easter approaches (even though sweets certainly do not have anything to do with the real meaning of Easter), this means I will forego the Easter basket goodies of Peeps and chocolate bunnies and those delicious little Cadbury eggs in the colorful candy shells. I will not miss the other Cadbury eggs that have the runny cream filling that resembles an egg yolk; my mother adored these and always tried to stock up when the candy went on sale after Easter. Not my favorite but definitely hers.

With our changed eating plan we have been trying to eat more vegetables. This is a challenge as we aren’t real vegetable-loving people. I like more veggies than Tom does, but in general we prefer our vegetables raw: salads with romaine and spinach, celery and carrots. Oh my. We have been eating lots and lots of carrots

.Here’s a bit of what I have learned about carrots. They were originally cultivated for their leaves and their seeds but we know and love them primarily as root vegetables. They were first grown in Afghanistan around 900 AD. Most of the carrots we consume now are of the orange variety but they do come in many colors, including purple, yellow, red, and even white. The earliest carrots were purple or yellow, as the orange variety was not developed until around the 15th century in the Netherlands.

Even though it is not part of our Easter menu this year, I have been thinking about and remembering close encounters with another use of carrots: carrot cake. I am a subscriber to the NYTimes Recipes page and they ran a recipe today for a very scrumptious looking piece of carrot cake.

But I actually encountered carrot cake long before the NYTimes was running recipes.

I can remember how excited my grandmother was to get a recipe for carrot cake. She was a fantastic cook who, to my knowledge, never owned or used a cook book; but one of her friends, either Mia Goldie Cook or Mia Luna Roberts from her church had given her a copy of a recipe for this new fandangled cake made with carrots.. Now Mama (my grandmother) already made other cakes: applesauce cake, coconut cake, pineapple cake, chocolate cake. She measured the ingredients using the palm of her hand instead of measuring spoons and an old tea cup with a broken off handle for a measuring cup. She was amazing in every way.

She liked to bake and was excited about this new cake to try. I think it was the 1960’s when carrot cakes started appearing on American tables. But it was served long before this. It is said that President George Washing served his guests carrot cake, though without the cream cheese icing that became the standard in the 1960’s.

During World War II, carrot cake became a very popular dessert in Britain as sugar was strictly rationed. Again, it was without the cream cheese icing but it was the carrots that gave the cake its sweetness. And unlike sugar, people in England could grow their carrots.

Carrot cake then sort of disappeared until the 1960’s when recipes began popping up in Southern Living and in church cookbooks. By the time my grandmother got the carrot cake recipe, the cream cheese icing had become a standard.

When we lived in rural southwest Virginia, we had a neighbor, Mrs. Givens, who made a gorgeously delicious carrot cake. She adored my husband and if we were visiting, she would always say, “Tom, would you like a piece of carrot cake?” to which he would always reply, “I would love a piece of your carrot cake.” She would slice him a very generous piece and then, truly as a most intentional afterthought, she would ask me if I wanted a slice. I would always reply, “That would be wonderful, “ and she would slice me a small sliver of cake. There was no doubting who was her favorite person at her kitchen table!

My friend Mary Maher, a very gifted graphic designer and also an exceptional cook, taught a children’s cooking class when I worked at the Virginia Discovery Museum in Charlottesville. From her I learned that crushed pineapple was a wonderful addition to a carrot cake recipe. She also created these lovely teeny tiny little recipe books to go home with each child in the class along with their little carrot cakes. It seems that even the pickiest child will eat a carrot in cake form.

But enough about cakes. Here’s to the humble orange carrot which is delicious in its own way—dipped in hummus, munched on as a healthy snack, fed to a bunny or a hungry horse, used as the nose on a snowman or just keeping one on the road to healthier eating.