Cruciform Vegetables

The word cruciform means in the shape of a cross.  Almost anyone could figure that out.  And if you heard that there was a class of plants called cruciform  plants, would you know what they were?  Perhaps if you are a gardener, you would.  You would have identified cabbage and broccoli and cauliflower plants as cross-shaped.  The young plants of these and other vegetables are shaped like a cross—specifcally, the Hugenot cross.

Broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, Swiss chard,  baahk choy, cauliflower, radish, kohlrabi, collard and turnip greens are just some of these cruciforms.  All of them have been found to be crammed with anticancer power. To paraphrase a pharmacist I know, If we ate nothing but cruciferous vegetables and fish we would nearly put the pharmaceutical companies out of business.

But we want to talk about their names.  Let’s start with broccoli.  It is the diminutive form of an Italian word, brocco, which means shoot or stalk. So it means little stalk. 

Though the Brussels sprout was first cultivated in Italy, the modern sprout was cultivated in Belgium, hence the name for the capital of Belgium.  The Brussels sprout is really a little cabbage and many of these tiny cabbages will grow on a single plant.

Speaking of cabbages, our word cabbage comes from a French word that means head:  the word caboche.

When I was a child I called that cabbage salad we all love cold slaw, but of course I eventually learned it was cole slaw.  And when we mention the word cole, we open the door to all kinds of cruciform vegetables. For the word cole is another word for cabbage, like kale.  Caul-iflower—note the variation on cole--simply means flowering cabbage.  Most European languages have a word for cabbage that is a variation of this word cole or kale.  As one moves from southern to northern Europe, this word for cabbage changes from the a sound of kale to the o sound of cole. 

Baahk choy, another cruciform, is a Chinese cabbage, and its name a phonetic representation of the Chinese word for this vegetable.  Swiss chard is more complicated. Chard comes from a French word that means thistle.  According to a book on vegetables written in 1832, “The food stalks and mid-ribs of the leaves of the white beet are stewed and eaten under the name of Swiss Chard.”  As for the Swiss part of the name, the best I can tell you is that in the 1800’s it was used in seed catalogs to distinguish chard from varieties of French spinach.

And a final cruciform, the piquant radish.  It comes from the Latin radix, which means root.  Nothing startling there.  But did you know that according to the  London Times in 1919, a radish communist was someone who openly professed allegiance to the Communist Party but secretly hoped for its downfall—red on the outside but white on the inside.

As I said, these cruciferous vegetables are some of the most healthful foods on earth. This seems appropriate, somehow, for a plant that starts out in the shape of a cross.