Where does broccoli come from?
Broccoli was certainly an Italian vegetable, as its name suggests, long before it was eaten elsewhere. Its first mention in France is in 1560, but in 1724 broccoli was still so unfamiliar in England that Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary (1724 edition) referred to it as a stranger in England and explained it as “sprout colli-flower” or “Italian asparagus”. In the American colonies, Thomas Jefferson was also an experimentative gardener with a wide circle of European correspondents, from whom he got packets of seeds for rare vegetables such as tomatoes, noted the planting of broccoli at Monticello along with radishes, lettuce, and cauliflower on May 27, 1767. Nevertheless, broccoli remained an exotic in American gardens. In 1775, John Randolph, in A Treatise on Gardening by a Citizen of Virginia, felt he had to explain about broccoli: “The stems will eat like Asparagus, and the heads like Cauliflower.” Broccoli was naturalized by the D’Arrigo brothers, Stephano and Andrea, immigrants
