Beets

Beta vulgaris is not a fancy plant. You can, if you insist, buy modern cultivars that aren’t red. But I think that yellow or white beets are freakish. And don’t start with me about the virtues of the striped Chioggia beet. This sport of nature is a slur on a perfectly decent town on the Adriatic near Venice. It is true that Chioggia’s original Latin name, Clodia Fossa, means the ditch of Clodius, after the Trojan refugee who founded it, and that it has never quite recovered from the Chioggian War (1379–1380) when it got caught between the armies of Venice and Genoa. But Chioggia is a pretty place, as well as the hometown of the great rococo portraitist Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757), and deserves better than to be remembered mainly for a beet that resembles a Swiss Guard.