40 Fun Facts About Arugula

Arugula, grown since the Roman era, had its seeds stirred into old concoctions meant to act as what?

Aphrodisiacs were arugula's old claim to fame: a first-century Greek herbal said that eating the leaves raw in quantity stirred desire, and that the seed did the same.

Which British astronaut kept two kilograms of arugula seeds on the International Space Station?

Tim Peake's six-month mission carried about a million seeds; once home, they went out to thousands of British schools to be grown beside seeds that had never left the ground.

Which presidential candidate was mocked in 2007 for asking Iowa farmers about the price of arugula?

Barack Obama cited what Whole Foods charges while arguing that farm policy should back specialty crops; he later joked that Iowans know perfectly well what arugula is.

Arugula and rocket both descend from the Latin word eruca, which also meant which small creature?

A caterpillar and the salad plant shared one Latin name, eruca, which became ruca and its diminutive ruchetta in Italian before English turned it into rocket.

London rocket, a cousin of arugula, reputedly got its name by thriving in the city after which disaster?

The Great Fire of 1666 left ash and rubble that the plant quickly colonised, though a botanist who combed London's bomb sites after 1940 failed to find a single specimen.

Which country's revolutionary calendar of the 1790s named one of its spring days after arugula?

France gave nearly every day of its Republican calendar a plant, animal or farm tool in place of a saint; Roquette fell on 24 Germinal, in mid-April.

In Egypt, arugula is served with ta'ameya, the local fava-bean version of which street food?

Falafel made from fava beans goes by ta'ameya in Egypt, where it usually comes with fresh tomatoes, tahini sauce and a handful of the peppery leaves.

The first known American use of the word arugula appeared in a 1960 food article in which newspaper?

The New York Times ran it in a piece by food editor Craig Claiborne; the green stayed a specialty item and only became widely popular in the United States in the 1990s.

Arugula sits with broccoli, kale and radishes in a botanical family commonly named after which plant?

Mustard gives its name to the Brassicaceae, so arugula is kin to cabbage, turnips and horseradish, whereas lettuce belongs with the daisies and sunflowers.

Arugula seeds that spent months in orbit later grew slightly less well, most likely because of what?

Radiation from cosmic rays can pass through a dormant seed or dump energy inside it, yet the space-flown batch still sprouted and grew nearly as well as the stay-at-home one.

In Italy, raw arugula is often scattered over which dish just as it comes out of the oven?

Pizza gets its arugula as a garnish at the very end of baking or just after; Italians have been tossing the leaves raw into salads since antiquity.

Cooks outside Italy often blend arugula into pesto in place of which herb of the Genoese classic?

Basil leaves are ground with garlic, pine nuts and coarse salt in the Genoese original; abroad, cooks also swap in parsley, mint, kale or wild garlic.

Gardeners use which word for arugula shooting up a tall flower stalk in hot weather?

Bolting is set off by long days, heat or dry soil, when the plant quickly sends up a branched flower stem two to three feet tall; a little shade helps slow it in midsummer.

Raw arugula is rich in folate and in which nutrient that the body needs to make blood clot?

Vitamin K takes its letter from Koagulationsvitamin, the clotting vitamin, as its Danish discoverer named it; a 100-gram serving of arugula delivers a rich dose for only 25 calories.

Which Japanese condiment, ground from a knobbly rhizome, belongs to arugula's botanical family?

Wasabi shares its botanical clan with arugula, horseradish, radishes and watercress, and its heat is felt in the nose more than on the tongue.

Salad arugula bears cream flowers veined with purple, but wild arugula blooms in which color?

Yellow flowers mark the wild kind, Diplotaxis tenuifolia, a hardy perennial with narrower, deeply cut leaves that copes with heat better than the annual salad plant.

Taramira, a pungent oil pressed from arugula seeds, is used for pickling in the north of which country?

India and Pakistan press the seeds in their drier regions because the plant shrugs off drought, and the leftover seed cake goes to feed livestock.

Arugula is a traditional leaf in mesclun, a salad mix said to have begun around Nice in which region?

Provence gave mesclun its name, from a dialect verb meaning to mix thoroughly; the classic blend joins arugula with chervil, leafy lettuces and endive.

Arugula's four-petaled flowers gave its plant family which older name, echoed in a term for broccoli and kale?

Cruciferae means cross-bearing, for four petals set like a cross; the old name survives in the phrase cruciferous vegetables, used for broccoli, cabbage and their kin.

Tagliata, sliced steak on a bed of arugula, grew out of the T-bone tradition of which Italian region?

Tuscany's capital, Florence, is famed for bistecca alla fiorentina, a huge Chianina T-bone grilled over charcoal; tagliata is its more recent, pre-sliced offshoot.

Rome's straccetti tops thin slices of beef with raw arugula and which Italian cheese?

Parmesan is the usual finish in Rome; elsewhere in Italy, arugula salads come with tomatoes and soft cheeses such as burrata, bocconcini or buffalo mozzarella.

On Italy's Amalfi coast and the island of Ischia, arugula flavors which after-dinner product?

A liqueur of the bittersweet amaro type is the result, sold as amaro di rucola and sipped as a digestif once the meal is over.

In Turkey, raw arugula is eaten as a side dish or salad that customarily accompanies which food?

Fish is the usual partner; Turkish cooks otherwise serve the leaves on their own, with a sauce of extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice.

Which crop was bred from rapeseed to be low in erucic acid, a fat named after arugula's genus Eruca?

Canola is rapeseed bred for food use with very little of the acid; erucic simply means relating to Eruca, the genus that holds arugula.

Which tiny insects riddle arugula leaves with shot holes and can devour whole seedlings?

Flea beetles spring away on enlarged hind legs when disturbed; gardeners keep them off with row covers, and holed leaves are still fine to eat.

A mild frost slows arugula's growth and can turn its green leaves which color?

Red leaves signal a chill, yet arugula tolerates frost well enough to be sown several weeks before the last one of spring.

In the PBS Kids cartoon Carl the Collector, twin sisters Nico and Arugula are which kind of animal?

Rabbits with opposite personalities, the identical twins are friends of Carl, a raccoon who leads the network's first series centred on autistic characters.

Arugula's species name sativa, also borne by rice and oats, is a Latin adjective meaning what?

Cultivated is the sense: sativa marks a plant that is sown in gardens rather than gathered wild, as in Avena sativa for oats and Oryza sativa for rice.

The spaceflight word rocket, unrelated to arugula's other name, comes from an Italian word for which tool?

A bobbin, rocchetto in old Italian, is a diminutive of rocca, a distaff for spinning thread; the leafy rocket goes back instead to Latin eruca.

Dictionaries trace the American word arugula to dialect forms such as arucola, from which Italian city?

Naples probably supplied the model, the Neapolitan arucola; standard Italian says rucola, and the English g reflects the soft southern way of saying the c.

Escaped arugula has become a prolific, noxious invader in which desert spanning Arizona and California?

Sonoran country is the exception; elsewhere the plant, which readily seeds itself, is a widespread but scattered escape from gardens.

Cavatieddi, pasta cooked with heaps of chopped arugula, comes from which region at the heel of Italy?

Apulia's cooks add large amounts of coarsely chopped arugula to the pasta, along with a reduced homemade tomato sauce and a grating of pecorino.

Which Greek physician's first-century herbal De Materia Medica noted arugula seeds being used in sauces?

Dioscorides added that the seeds kept longer once steeped in vinegar or milk and shaped into lozenges, and that a sharper wild kind grew in Iberia.

Which sulfur-bearing compounds, broken down when the leaf is chewed, give arugula its peppery bite?

Glucosinolates sit intact in the leaf until chewing or cutting lets the enzyme myrosinase split them into sharp-tasting isothiocyanates; the same chemistry flavors horseradish and watercress.

German food-safety officials once urged moderation with arugula, whose leaves can be very high in what?

Nitrate above 5,000 milligrams per kilogram turned up in about half of 350 samples tested; plants draw the compound from the soil to build protein.

An English garden writer noted in 1822 that arugula had long been rejected as a salad herb for which reason?

Its smell, which the writer called ungrateful, had pushed a once popular salad herb out of English gardens; wild rocket leaves are still described as musty.

Arugula's edible cream flowers, used to garnish salads and soups, taste how compared with the leaves?

Milder than the foliage, the flowers are not the only bonus: the young seed pods can be eaten too, and whole stems are cut as filler for bouquets.

Salata roka, arugula dressed simply with olive oil and vinegar or lemon, is a salad of which country?

Greece's more famous village salad, horiatiki, is built instead on tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, olives and feta cheese.

In Turkey, fresh arugula, white cheese and sweet melon traditionally accompany which anise-flavored spirit?

Rakı is also poured with grilled or oven-cooked seafood, olive-oil dishes, roasted summer vegetables and the garlic-yogurt dip haydari.

Botanists give which name to the long, beaked seed pods of arugula and its cabbage-clan relatives?

Siliques shatter when dry to release the seed; arugula's stand upright, reach about an inch and a half long and each hold six to eight brown seeds.