Cauliflower groups. In the 1st century AD, Pliny included what he called "cyma" among his descriptions of cultivated plants in "Natural History": ""Ex omnibus brassicae generibus suavissima est cyma,"" ("Of all the varieties of cabbage the most pleasant-tasted is "cyma""). Pliny's descriptions likely refer to the flowering heads of an earlier cultivated variety of "Brassica oleracea", but comes close to describing modern cauliflower. It is found in the writings of the Arab botanists Ibn al-'Awwam and Ibn al-Baitar, in the 12th and 13th centuries when its origins were said to be Cyprus. François Pierre La Varenne employed "chouxfleurs" in "Le cuisinier
Columbus's letter on the first voyage by Tomás González, an archivist at Simancas. Gonzalez's copy has since been lost, and exists now only in the Navarrete transcription.It is uncertain exactly what edition or manuscript González copied (although some of the tell-tale mistakes of the Barcelona edition are repeated). The Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen found another hand-written copy of the Spanish letter to Santangel among the papers of the Colegio Mayor de Cuenca in Salamanca. This copy contains a significantly different ending, ""Fecha en la carabela, sobre la Isla de S.a Maria, 18 de Febrero de 93"." ("written on the caravel, on the island of