Crapaudine

Crapaudine is billed by Uprising Seeds as the oldest beet cultivar still in existence, dating back possibly a thousand years to the time of Charlemagne; the Quebec seedhouse Semences des Artisans dates it to the 12th century. Either way it predates the modern globe beet by centuries and looks nothing like one. The name comes from crapaud, French for toad, after skin so thick, cracked and warty that it reads as bark rather than root vegetable. The root itself is long and tapered, carrot-shaped rather than round, and it drives deep with abundant fine rootlets tangling around it. It is slow, 75 to 80 days and often a month longer than a standard beet, which is precisely why commerce abandoned it and why French markets and restaurant kitchens never did.