broccolo

Broccoli comes from Italian broccoli, the plural of broccolo, a diminutive of brocco, meaning 'sprout, shoot, or small projecting part.' The word brocco itself derives from Latin broccus or broccus, meaning 'projecting, pointed,' originally describing prominent teeth or any object that stuck out. The semantic path from 'projecting tooth' to 'vegetable' runs through the observation that broccoli's tight clusters of flower buds, each one a tiny protrusion sprouting from a central stalk, resemble a collection of small shoots or points pushing outward. The Italians who named this vegetable were not describing its flavor or its nutritional properties but its physical form — the way it branches and sprouts, each floret a miniature tree growing from a trunk. The word is an act of visual description frozen in language, a metaphor so successful that it has become the thing's only name.

Broccoli is a cultivar of Brassica oleracea, the remarkably versatile wild cabbage species that, through centuries of selective breeding, has also produced cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and cabbage itself. The Romans cultivated several varieties of Brassica, and Pliny the Elder mentions a vegetable that may have been an early form of broccoli, but the vegetable we recognize today was developed in Italy, probably in the southern regions of Calabria and Sicily, during the late Roman Empire or the early medieval period. Italian gardeners selected for the plant's immature flower heads, breeding varieties that produced increasingly large, dense clusters of buds before flowering. This is the essential trick of broccoli: you eat the flowers before they open, harvesting the plant's reproductive effort at the moment of maximum potential energy.

Broccoli remained largely an Italian vegetable until the sixteenth century, when Catherine de' Medici's marriage to King Henry II of France in 1533 is traditionally credited with introducing Italian culinary sophistication to the French court. Whether or not Catherine personally brought broccoli to France, Italian vegetables including broccoli, artichokes, and various beans did cross the Alps during this period of intense cultural exchange. The English encountered broccoli somewhat later: the first recorded English use of the word appears in 1699 in John Evelyn's Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, where he describes 'Italian Broccoli' as a novel vegetable. English and American cookbooks of the eighteenth century treated it as an exotic import, something requiring explanation and careful instruction for cooks unfamiliar with its preparation.

Italian immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought broccoli with them, and commercial cultivation began in California in the 1920s. The D'Arrigo brothers, Stephano and Andrea, are credited with pioneering large-scale broccoli farming in the United States, shipping the first commercially grown broccoli from San Jose, California, to the East Coast in 1929. American acceptance was gradual — broccoli remained an ethnic vegetable associated with Italian-American cooking through the mid-twentieth century — but by the 1970s and 1980s, nutritional science had identified broccoli as exceptionally rich in vitamins, fiber, and cancer-fighting compounds, elevating it to superfood status. President George H. W. Bush's 1990 declaration that he did not like broccoli and would not eat it generated national headlines, inadvertently giving the vegetable more publicity than any advertising campaign could have achieved. The little sprout had become a cultural institution.