ISSUE 49, GOOD FOR YOU, Part 5: Crosby's Egyptian Beet
Crosby’s Egyptian Beet
A conviction seized Americans in the mid-19th century that the most healthful of root vegetables was not the potato, sweet potato, carrot, or turnip, but the beet. There was thinking by analogy at work. The red purples of the dark beets seemed to some to be blood, the divine fluid. The conviction that meat was the healthiest of all things to eat (vegetarians had to fight this ancient belief for decades in the 19th century), and the sense that dark beets were meat in root form, had gardeners seeking well-formed productive dark colored beets.
In the 1870s Josiah Crosby of Arlington, Massachusetts, began seed selecting the flat Egyptian to make it thicker and more spheroidal, to make the root surface smooth, to preserve the 50 day growth period, and maintain the strikingly deep green foliage. A decade of selection produced a splendidly tender beet, suited to home hardening and produce stand sales as a “bunch beet.” James J. H. Gregory, the entrepreneurial New England plantsman who had popularized the Hubbard Squash and Danvers Yellow Globe Onion, adopted the plant and made it available in his 1885 Catalog. He touted its virtues thusly, “A very superior strain of the Early Egyptian, made by one of the most noted market gardeners near Boston. While as early, it makes a thicker beet than the common Egyptian.”
Josiah Crosby (1805-1887) belonged to a vibrant community of commercial vegetable producers in Arlington, that included W. W. Rawson the cucumber breeder and 28 other market gardeners. The acreage was located on Lake Street. His first experiments were with York cabbages and carrots in the 1850s. His blood root beets began winning prizes in the Horticultural Exhibitions in 1861. Crosby made a national reputation taking a thick short-cob early sweet corn developed by the Sioux and creating Early Crosby Sweet Corn which became widely planted in the North as the first in a succession of sweet corn varieties harvested over the summer: Early Crosby first, Stowell’s Evergreen second, [Eighteenth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture for 1870 (Boston, 1871), 155.] He refined the dandelion into a salad plant in the 1870s and did extensive work with celery, radishes, and lettuces, and onions. [“Josiah Crosby,” obituary, Boston Journal (April 24, 1887), 3.
When one slices the Crosby’s Egyptian transversely across the swell of the bulb the face of the cut reveals beautiful concentric circles of red and pink or white. Some who took up the vegetable wished there to be less pronounced contrast in color and attempted to make the whitish-pink rings to be more red. A second aesthetic direction pursued by breeders was to create a vermillion color beet. If eye appeal accounted for dollars at the produce stand, creating a visually distinctive beet with a lighter red color would attraction consumers. So the Light Red Crosby became a subsidiary strain.
One liability discovered in the Crosby’s Egyptian beet was that its rich color would fade during processing, so the rich reds would pale. This forclosed the Crosby from being used in canning and pickling processes that employed boiling and acid saturation. It remained throughout its long market history a “bunch beet” for market gardeners and a standard garden beet for backyard or kitchen garden growers.
Many seed companies grew populations of Crosby Egyptian for seed. When a systematic grow out of the seed occurred in New Jersey I 1914, the crop scientist L. G. Schermerhorn reported, “there is no uniform standard for selection among beet seed growers, there being a notable lack of uniformity in the varietal character of the stocks.” [L. G. Schermerhorn, “Investigations with Vegetables, 1915” Thirty-Sixth Annual Report of New Jersey State Agricultural Experiment Station Report (Rutgers, 1916), 53.] One general tendency was the Crosby became more top-like in shape and less spheroidal. Despite the variety of forms, most of the beets bearing the name Crosby Egyptian retained several winning traits: it was early, it was never woody, it invariably produced neat modestly proportioned foliage, and the skin of the beet root was smooth. It also resisted root rot.
These virtues and its flavor have made Crosby’s Egyptian one of the two most popular—along with the Detroit Dark Red—heirloom beets developed in the United States.