Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa, the salad or garden rocket, still frequently published as Eruca sativa; the wild rocket of the modern market is not a variety of it but a separate genus, Diplotaxis tenuifolia
Origin: The Mediterranean basin and western Asia, by two separate routes and two separate plants: <em>Eruca vesicaria</em> subsp. <em>sativa</em> from the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean, and <em>Diplotaxis tenuifolia</em> from the stony ground and old walls of the northern Mediterranean, above all the volcanic islands of the Bay of Naples.
Rocket is barely domesticated, and that is the most useful thing to know about it. Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa is native to a broad band running from the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco eastwards through the Levant into Iran, and across most of that range it behaves as a weed of disturbed ground: it germinates in days, flowers in weeks, sets seed and dies. A plant of that habit does not need a domestication event so much as a decision to stop pulling it up. There is no moment at which rocket was taken in hand and transformed, as wheat and maize were transformed, and the cultivated leaf differs from the wild one chiefly in being larger, milder, and grown where it can be found again.
What the record does show is a plant valued early and written about consistently. Theophrastus describes euzomon in the fourth century BCE amongst the pot-herbs sown in Greek gardens, noting that it germinates quickly. The oroth which the servant gathers from the field in 2 Kings 4:39, in the account of the poisoned pot at Gilgal, is identified by a number of commentators as rocket, and the Mishnah and Talmud both treat it as an ordinary garden crop with rules attached, which is the surest sign that a plant is being grown rather than merely found. By the Roman period the plant is not only cultivated but classified, prescribed, and joked about.
The second plant arrived in cultivation two thousand years later. Diplotaxis tenuifolia, perennial wall-rocket, grows wild on rubble, roadsides, and old masonry across southern Europe and had been gathered for centuries without ever being sown: it is the ruchetta selvatica of the Italian countryside, narrower in the leaf, deeply cut, and markedly hotter than the garden plant. Commercial growers took it up only in the closing decades of the twentieth century, when the washed-and-bagged salad trade needed a leaf that would hold its condition in a sealed pack for a week. Wild rocket does; garden rocket wilts. The result is that most people who now buy something labelled rocket are buying a plant that was still a genuinely wild species within living memory.
Rocket travelled in three distinct waves, and they had almost nothing to do with one another.
The first was Roman, and it was a matter of reputation rather than cuisine. Rome inherited the plant from the eastern Mediterranean and attached to it a conviction, stated so often that it becomes tiresome, that rocket provokes lust. Pliny sets its heat against the coldness of lettuce and recommends the two be eaten together so that each corrects the other. Columella's garden poem has it rousing sluggish husbands to Venus; Ovid warns the man trying to fall out of love to avoid the salacious herb; Martial reaches for it in a poem about impotence; the Moretum of the Appendix Vergiliana sets it growing in the smallholder's plot as the plant that revives a slow Venus. The empire carried it wherever it carried gardens, and when the empire went, the plant stayed, self-seeding through the Mediterranean as it had always done.
The second wave was Arabic and eastern, and it produced the plant's most durable everyday role. Under the names jarjīr and gargīr rocket became a daily green from the Nile Delta through the Levant and into Anatolia: not a garnish and not a salad ingredient amongst others, but a bunch on the table to be torn and eaten by hand alongside beans, bread, or grilled fish. Ibn al-'Awwām's twelfth-century agricultural treatise from Seville gives instructions for growing it. That role has not changed in a thousand years and remains, in sheer tonnage eaten, the most important thing rocket does.
The third wave is very recent and is the reason most of the world now knows the plant at all. Rocket was in English gardens by the seventeenth century, catalogued by John Evelyn in 1699, and then it simply left: it fell out of British and northern European cooking for the better part of three centuries. It returned in the 1980s and 1990s through Italian restaurant cooking, arriving in Britain and North America not as a rediscovered native but as an import with an Italian accent, and reaching Brazil rather earlier in the luggage of southern Italian emigrants to São Paulo. The American name for it, arugula, is itself a fossil of that route, being a southern Italian dialect form carried to New York and never translated.
Rocket occupies two entirely separate positions in the world's kitchens, and the gap between them is wider than for almost any other leaf.
Around the eastern Mediterranean it is a staple in the plainest sense. In Egypt gargīr is sold in wet bunches on every vegetable barrow and eaten raw and undressed with ful medames at breakfast, with ta'meya, and above all with grilled fish, where its heat does the work that lemon does elsewhere. In Turkey roka is a fixed meze, dressed with lemon and olive oil and set beside fish and rakı as a matter of course. In the Levant jarjīr goes into salads with tomato, onion, and sumac, or is simply piled on the table. None of this is fashionable and none of it is new.
In Italy the plant is a cooking green as much as a salad one, and the distinction between the two species matters. Rucola selvatica, the wild Diplotaxis, goes into pasta in Puglia, where it is boiled with the pasta itself and dressed with garlic and oil, and into the pesto of the south, where it replaces basil to sharper effect. It is also the base of Ischia's rucolino, a bitter digestivo made from leaves gathered on the island. Further north the leaf is used raw and cold against fat and salt: under bresaola with shaved grana, on pizza after the oven, over carpaccio.
Elsewhere it is a salad leaf and little else, though an enormously successful one. The bagged-salad trade rebuilt the plant's economics around Diplotaxis, which travels; Italy grows most of Europe's supply. Brazil is the largest consumer outside the Mediterranean, where rúcula is standard on pizza and in salad. And India and Pakistan grow more Eruca sativa than anywhere on earth without eating the leaf at all: there the plant is taramira, a hardy rabi oilseed of the arid north-west, pressed for an oil blended into mustard oil to sharpen it. One species, grown at continental scale, for something no salad-eater would recognise as the same crop.
Historical Journey of Rocket
The Levant & the Eastern Mediterranean — c. 1000 BCE
Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa is native to the whole eastern Mediterranean seaboard, and this is where it moved from a plant that was found to a plant that was grown. The transition left little archaeological trace, for the good reason that rocket is an annual weed of disturbed ground which germinates in days and needs no coaxing; bringing it into a garden was less a matter of domestication than of tolerating it near the house. The textual record is clearer than the botanical one. The oroth which the servant goes out to gather from the field in the account of the poisoned pot at Gilgal, in 2 Kings 4:39, is identified by a number of commentators as rocket, and both the Mishnah and the Talmud treat it as an ordinary garden crop with agricultural rules attached, which is the surest evidence that a plant is being cultivated rather than foraged.
What the Levant established was not a dish but a habit, and the habit has proved extraordinarily durable: rocket eaten raw, in quantity, undressed or barely dressed, and torn by hand from a bunch set on the table rather than composed into anything. It is still eaten this way from Gaza to Aleppo, and salatet jarjīr, in which the leaves meet tomato, onion, lemon, and sumac, is the composed version of a practice that mostly remains uncomposed. The Arabic name jarjīr which the plant acquired here travelled with it into Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew, and it is the name by which most of the plant's eaters know it to this day.
Ischia, Procida & the Volcanic Islands of the Bay of Naples — c. 100 BCE
The second origin belongs to a different plant, and the atlas separates them because the modern market does not. Diplotaxis tenuifolia, perennial wall-rocket, is a distinct genus from Eruca: narrower in the leaf, more deeply cut, perennial where the other is annual, and appreciably hotter. It is native to the stony ground, old walls, and volcanic scree of the northern Mediterranean, and nowhere more abundantly than on Ischia, Procida, and Ventotene, where it grows unattended across the tufa and has been gathered by islanders for as long as there have been islanders to gather it.
For two thousand years that was the whole of its cultivation: it was never sown, because it did not need to be. Roman writers already prized the wild plant above the garden one for the strength of its flavour, and the island habit of steeping the gathered leaves in spirit to make a bitter digestivo is a peasant practice of considerable age, surviving commercially as Ischia's rucolino. The remarkable turn came in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the washed-and-bagged salad trade discovered that Diplotaxis keeps its condition in a sealed pack for a week whilst garden rocket collapses in two days. Growers took the wild plant into cultivation within a single generation. Most rocket now sold in the world is this species, which means that the leaf in the average supermarket bag was a genuinely wild plant within living memory.
Rome & the Italian Peninsula — c. 65 CE
Rome took the plant from the eastern Mediterranean and gave it the reputation it has never quite shaken. Within roughly a century four separate Latin authors treat rocket as an aphrodisiac so well known that it can be used as a punchline: Columella's verse treatise on the garden has eruca rousing sluggish husbands to Venus, Ovid instructs the man trying to fall out of love to avoid the salacious herb, Martial reaches for it in an epigram about impotence, and the Moretum sets it growing in a smallholder's plot as the plant that revives a lingering Venus. Dioscorides records the same belief in medical rather than comic terms.
Pliny is the one who matters most for the kitchen, because he supplies the practical instruction rather than the joke. In Book XIX he sets rocket's heat against the coldness of lettuce and recommends that the two be eaten together so that each corrects the other. That is a humoral prescription rather than a culinary one, but it produces a genuinely good salad, and it is the direct ancestor of every mixed leaf sold since. Italy has never stopped eating the plant. Rome pairs it raw with rare beef in straccetti, dresses it with nothing but oil, lemon, and shaved grana, and puts it on pizza after the oven rather than before, so that the heat is bruised out of it but not cooked away.
Alexandria & the Nile Delta — c. 100 CE
Egypt is where rocket became an everyday food rather than a notable one, and it has held that position longer than any other place. The plant is native to the region and its use in the Delta is older than the record of it; what the Greco-Roman period supplies is the first documentation, with Dioscorides describing euzōmon from the eastern Mediterranean world in the same decades that Pliny was writing in Rome. The Arabic centuries then fixed both the name and the habit. As jarjīr, realised in Egyptian speech as gargīr, the plant appears throughout the Arabic agricultural and medical literature, from Ibn al-'Awwām's cultivation instructions to Ibn al-Bayṭār's materia medica.
The Egyptian way with it has almost nothing in common with the European salad. Gargīr is sold in wet bunches on the vegetable barrow, taken home unwashed, and set on the table whole, to be torn and eaten by hand: with ful medames at breakfast, with ta'meya, with kebab, and above all with grilled fish, where the heat of the leaf does the work that lemon does elsewhere and cuts oiliness the way a pickle would. It is dressed, when it is dressed at all, with no more than lemon, garlic, and salt. It is amongst the cheapest things in the market, and by weight eaten it is very likely the single largest culinary use of rocket on earth.
Puglia & the Murge Plateau — c. 1500 CE
Puglia is where wild rocket stopped being a salad leaf and became a cooking green, and the shift is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to the plant in a kitchen. Ruchetta selvatica grows across the Murge and the Salento all year round, in field margins, on drystone walls, and through the stony ground that suits it better than any crop does, which made it free at a time and in a place where very little was. The cookery that resulted is cucina povera in the exact sense: the leaf is not garnish and not salad but the substance of the dish.
The defining preparation is cavatelli e rucola, in which the rocket is thrown into the pasta water for the last minutes so that pasta and green cook together and are dressed with nothing more than garlic browned in oil, sometimes with a little chilli, sometimes with a spoonful of the potato boiled alongside to bind it. Cooking transforms the plant. The raw pepperiness collapses into a deep, faintly bitter, almost nutty flavour with no obvious relation to the salad leaf, and the wild plant, which is markedly hotter than the garden one, is what makes the dish work; grown rocket produces something noticeably thinner. The same principle drives the southern pesto di rucola, where rocket stands in for basil and gives a sharper, more savoury paste.
Istanbul & the Ottoman Aegean — c. 1550 CE
The Ottoman table gave rocket a fixed job and it has held it ever since. Roka, taking its name through the Arabic jarjīr tradition of the empire's Levantine and Egyptian provinces and its form from the Italian, became one of the standing cold meze of the Turkish coast, and the pairing it belongs to is specific rather than general: rocket goes with fish, and with the rakı that goes with fish. On the Aegean and Marmara coasts a plate of it arrives as a matter of course beside grilled or fried fish, dressed with lemon and olive oil, frequently with a little sumac, and sometimes with nothing but lemon.
The reasoning is the same as the Egyptian one and arrives at a more formal result. Oily grilled fish wants something hot and acid against it, and the rocket supplies both the heat and, with the lemon, the acid, in a way that a mild leaf cannot. In Turkish practice the leaves are usually left long and whole rather than chopped, laid out flat on the plate with raw onion or radish, and eaten with the fingers as much as with a fork. It is the most codified of the eastern Mediterranean uses of the plant: not a component of a salad but a dish in its own right, with a name, a place in the meal, and a drink to go with it.
London & England — 1699 CE
Rocket reached English gardens with the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for the composed salad, an enthusiasm fed by Italian example and by the classical authors then being read closely on questions of diet. Its documentary monument is John Evelyn's Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets of 1699, the first book in English devoted to the subject, which catalogues eighty-two salad plants and sets out a nine-part method for dressing them. Rocket is entry fifty-three, and Evelyn's note on it is worth quoting whole: "Rocket, Eruca Spanish; hot and dry, to be qualified with Lettuce, Purcelain, and the rest, &c."
That is Pliny's prescription, sixteen hundred years later, essentially word for word: a hot leaf to be corrected by cold ones. Evelyn's name for it, Spanish rocket, points to a Mediterranean provenance rather than a native one, and he took his framework from the same classical dietary literature that Pliny helped to build.
And then the plant left. Rocket fell out of British cooking almost entirely for the better part of three centuries, surviving in seed catalogues and old herbals but not on plates, until it returned in the 1980s and 1990s through Italian restaurant cooking and the bagged-salad trade. It came back not as a rediscovered native but as an import with an Italian accent, and it came back completely: it is now amongst the most widely sold leaves in Britain, which makes it one of the few plants in the atlas to have entered a national cuisine, disappeared from it, and entered it again from outside.
Nice & the County of Nice — c. 1750 CE
The County of Nice, Italian-speaking and Savoyard until 1860, produced the one European salad tradition in which rocket is not optional. Mesclun, from the Niçois mesclumo, a mixture, is not a bag of assorted leaves but a defined thing: a mix sown together, cut young together, and sold together by the growers of the hills behind the town. To count as a true mesclun de Nice the mixture must contain chervil and roquette, together with a minimum of five lettuces, and many Niçois hold out for a considerably longer list including escarole, frisée, and cutting chicory.
The composition is not arbitrary and it is not new. A mixture of a hot leaf, a bitter leaf, an aromatic leaf, and several mild ones is exactly the balance Pliny recommended and Evelyn repeated, arrived at independently by growers who were unlikely to have read either. Rocket is the hot element and cannot be left out without the mixture losing its point. The dressing is correspondingly plain: good oil, a little vinegar or lemon, salt, and frequently a garlic-rubbed crust turned through the leaves. Mesclun is also the form in which rocket would eventually cross the Atlantic, since it was the Niçois mixture rather than the single leaf that American growers and cooks took up in the 1970s and 1980s.
São Paulo & the Italian Quarters — c. 1900 CE
Between 1880 and 1930 well over a million Italians landed in São Paulo state, the greater part of them from the Mezzogiorno and the Veneto, and they brought the plants they cooked with. Rúcula took to Brazil immediately: it is an annual that runs to seed in heat, which is a defect in a Mediterranean summer and no obstacle at all where it can be sown continuously through the year. Within a generation it had moved from the immigrant smallholdings of the Italian quarters, Bexiga and Brás above all, into the general market.
Brazil is now the largest consumer of rocket outside the Mediterranean world, and its characteristic use is one that no Italian region invented. The pizza paulistana is its own tradition, built in a city that had more Italians than most Italian cities and then went its own way, and the rocket goes on after the bake, in a raw heap over hot cheese, most classically with buffalo mozzarella and often with a scatter of sun-dried tomato or a shaving of parmesan. The heat of the pizza wilts the leaves just enough to release the pepperiness whilst leaving them fresh, and in São Paulo the combination is not a variation on an Italian original but a standard of the local repertoire in its own right.
Lombardy & the Valtellina — c. 1930 CE
Northern Italy uses rocket for a purpose the south does not: raw and cold, against salt and fat, as the sharp element in a cured-meat dish rather than as a vegetable in its own right. The exemplary case is bresaola. The Valtellina has air-dried salted beef since at least the fifteenth century, and bresaola della Valtellina acquired protected status in 1996, but the plate on which it is now almost universally served, sliced tissue-thin and covered with rocket, shaved grana, lemon, olive oil, and pepper, is a twentieth-century construction that spread from Lombardy through Italian restaurant cooking everywhere.
The logic of it is worth stating because it explains a great deal of what rocket is used for outside the Mediterranean. Bresaola is lean, intensely salty, and slightly sweet; grana is salt and fat; on their own the two are monotonous after a few mouthfuls. Rocket supplies bitterness and heat, lemon supplies acid, and the plate resolves. Precisely the same reasoning puts rocket over carpaccio, into a steak sandwich, and under prosciutto. This is the use that travelled furthest and fastest in the late twentieth century, and for most people in Britain, North America, and Australia it is the way they first met the plant.
Berkeley & the California Coast — c. 1980 CE
Rocket had been in the United States since the nineteenth century, growing in the kitchen gardens of Italian immigrants and sold under the Neapolitan dialect name they brought with them, but it stayed within those communities for the better part of a hundred years. What moved it out was the Californian kitchen-garden movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and specifically the decision by cooks around Chez Panisse in Berkeley to grow salad the Niçois way: mesclun sown as a mixture, cut young, and picked the morning it was served. Rocket came in as the hot component of that mixture rather than as a leaf anyone had asked for.
It then escaped the mixture and became a signature in its own right, in a form now found everywhere: rocket dressed with lemon and oil, set against something warm and rich. The Chez Panisse pairing of the leaves with a round of goat's cheese warmed in the oven and rolled in crumbs became one of the most widely copied restaurant dishes in America. The name travelled with it, which is why the United States says arugula and Britain says rocket for the same plant: American cooks took the word from Italian-American greengrocers rather than from French or from books, and by the time the leaf reached the national menu the dialect form was fixed.
