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Castles, Lighthouses, and Locomotives,
A Roman Wrinkle Cure,
A Curmudgeonly Cryptographer,
A Diet for Diamond Hunters, and
A Weekly Dish of Woolton Pie
Rosebud or rhubarb,
Filet or plain beef stew,
Tell me, tell me, tell me, Dream Face,
What am I to you?
DUKE ELLINGTON
The turnip’s finest hour occurred at dinnertime in the sixteenth century when, carved in the shape of a castle (“gilded with egg yolk”), cathedral, or sailing ship, it served as a fantastic centerpiece on the grandest of aristocratic tables. Since then it’s been a steady slide from glory. The turnip, historically, is the favored food of cows, pigs, and desperate peasants. Fewer and fewer gardeners these days bother to grow them, and younger diners, presented with them, have a tendency to push them fretfully about on their plates and hide them under the mashed potatoes.
Still, people have been growing turnips since the Neolithic era, and turnip seeds, saved in pots, have been found in Swiss lake dwellings. Plant scientists hypothesize dual centers of origin for the now-neglected turnip, one in the eastern Mediterranean, the other in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Oldest of the cultivated turnips is thought to be the Asian Brassica rapa ssp. oleifera, commonly known as rape, grown for its oil-bearing seeds. Rapeseed oil, used in lamps since ancient times, was the oil of choice in the nineteenth century for illuminating lighthouses and lubricating steam locomotives. It’s still around today: tastefully renamed canola oil, it’s commonly used in cooking.
The first turnip cultivated in Europe, however, was Brassica rapa ssp. rapa — the garden turnip — grown for its edible roots. The Romans ate them, but — even though the first-century cookbook Apicius includes upper-class recipes for duck with turnips, turnip pickle with myrtle berries, and boiled turnips seasoned with cumin, honey, and vinegar — the Roman turnip was ordinarily considered poverty food. It was similarly a cottage, rather than a castle, vegetable during the Middle Ages; in England, turnips appeared on the occasional family coat-of-arms to indicate a benefactor of the poor.
Medicinally, the turnip, mashed and mixed with suet, was recommended for winter maladies: frozen feet, chilblains, and aching joints. It was also used to treat “goute,” smallpox, and measles, and to make a nice “sope” for “beautifying the face,” a custom that may have been handed down from Roman times, when Apicius urged the wrinkle-conscious to use facial masks of cooked turnip, cream, and mashed rosebuds. Two applications, he claimed, would leave the aging face as smooth as a baby’s thigh. Less frivolously, professional sixteenth-century cutlers used turnip juice to temper steel, and individuals with nothing better to drink fermented turnips and turned them into alcohol.
John Gerard (1597) describes “Turneps” of several types — large and small, round, “peare-fashion,” and “longish;” as does John Parkinson (1629), who mentions white, yellow, and red turnips, and the “Navew gentle,” which is shaped like a carrot. The white kind, a globular turnip with a “pigges tale-like roote” underneath it, is the most common, Parkinson tells us; and both he and Gerard agree that turnips are primarily eaten by the “poore.” In Wales, according to Gerard, the utterly broke didn’t even bother to boil their turnips, but simply gnawed upon them, raw.
Because of the turnip’s generally lousy press, “turnip eater” traditionally meant lower-class dullard. “Let the lowborn dig turnips!” was a German catchphrase dating to the fourteenth century; and in Old French, anything conspicuously worthless was deemed “not worth a turnip.” François Rabelais, in his bawdy sixteenth-century satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, referred to country bumpkins as turnip-chewers, and German scholar Johannes Trithemius, who wrote the world’s first printed book on ciphers and cryptology, began with an introductory poke at the dim-witted common man:
“This I did that to men of learning and men deeply engaged in the study of magic, it might, by the Grace of God, be in some degree intelligible, while on the other hand, to the thick-skinned turnip-eaters it might for all time remain a hidden secret, and be to their dull intellects a sealed book forever.”
In the popular BBC series Blackadder, which traces the fortunes of the hapless Blackadder family dynasty from 1485 to World War I, doofy dogsbody Baldrick (Tony Robinson), servant to Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson), is noted for his multigenerational lowbrow love of turnips. The Elizabethan Baldrick was famed for his recipe for Turnip Surprise, which — the surprise — contains absolutely nothing but a turnip.
With its vulgar associations and silly appearance — bulbous below, shaggy above — the turnip is an unlikely literary hero, but apparently it has been one since at least the fourteenth century. The Grimm Brothers’ tale “The Turnip,” for example, harks back to a trio of medieval Latin poems, the gist of which is deserved comeuppance. A poor but honest farmer brings an enormous turnip as a gift to the king, and receives a purse of gold as a reward. The farmer’s wealthy neighbor (or, occasionally, half-brother) then decides to give the king a horse, hoping for an even bigger and better reward. Instead, he gets the turnip.
Turnip tall tales date to sixteenth-century Germany, where folk stories variously feature a turnip so big that it filled an entire cart, a turnip that took three days to ride around on horseback, and a turnip so huge that a cow could eat its way into the middle of it and vanish, with nothing left showing but the tip of a tail. Still around today are picture-book versions of the Russian story of the gigantic turnip, a cumulative tale in which an old man and woman plant a turnip and then find that it’s so huge that they can’t pull it up. The result is a tug-of-war with every person and animal on the farm hauling on the turnip, until finally a vegetable the size of a small house explodes out of the ground.
The turnip tales, argues Harvard classics professor Jan Ziolkowski in Fairy Tales Before Fairy Tales (2009), may reflect the human fascination with novelty — we like oddly enormous vegetables — or they may simply give the prolific turnip its due. The turnip is famous for bulk, and for what it has historically provided best: lots and lots of good cheap food.
Introduced to England by the invading Romans along with apples, lavender, and peas, the turnip led a career of relative obscurity until it came to the attention of Charles, second Viscount Townshend. Townshend — later nicknamed “Turnip” Townshend — was a passionate agriculturist who, in the early 1700s, promoted the turnip both as livestock feed and as part of a four-crop cycle of crop rotation with sequential plantings of wheat, barley, turnips, and clover. Daniel Defoe, tramping through Townshend’s home county of Norfolk in 1724, wrote: “this part of England is remarkable for being the first where the feeding and fattening of sheep and other cattle with turnips was first practiced . . . a very great part of the improvement of their lands to this day.”
King George II was so impressed with the Norfolk turnips that he had an instructional report written about them for the edification of his subjects across the Channel in Hanover. Even the irascible William Cobbett admired the Norfolk turnip fields. Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightley, the love interest in Emma (1815), grew turnips.
Turnips were first planted in America by Jacques Cartier, who tended a kitchen garden in Quebec in 1541 while fielding expeditions to collect what he fondly believed to be gold and diamonds. (They turned out to be iron pyrites and quartz crystals, which inspired the contemporaneous French expression “fake as Canadian diamonds.”) The Jamestown colonists planted turnips in Virginia. “Our English seeds thrive very well heere,” wrote Alexander Whitacker in Good Newes of Virginia (1612), a bolstering report to the colonists’ backers in London, citing the pleasant climate, the abundant wildlife, and the success of “Pease, Onions, Turnips, Cabbages.”
Turnips also grew in the gardens of Massachusetts Bay: a letter from Governor John Winthrop to his wife in Boston sends kisses, inquires after the children, and reminds her to get in the turnips. John Randolph, in his Treatise on Gardening (1793), lists “the white and purple rooted Turnep” as best for the table.
At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson, who ate turnips with sugar in ragouts, grew ten kinds.
By the nineteenth century, seed catalogs offered dozens of different turnip varieties. D. M. Ferry, in 1881, listed twenty-one turnips, and Burpee, in 1888, carried sixteen, including the White Egg; the Cowhorn, a white carrot-shaped variety; and the Golden Ball or Orange Jelly, noted for “rich, sweet, pulpy flesh.” Vilmorin-Andrieux’s The Vegetable Garden (1885) describes forty-five, among them carrot-shaped, round, and flat turnips, which last in illustrations look somewhat like hockey pucks.
The notable success of the turnip paved the way for the rutabaga, which is neither turnip nor cabbage but somewhere in between. While the cabbage has eighteen chromosomes and the turnip twenty, the rutabaga — which cheerfully incorporates both — has thirty-eight. Scientists guess that the crucial combinatorial mating took place at some point in the Middle Ages, possibly in Scandinavia, where the cool climate particularly suits them.
The first written mention of the rutabaga occurs in 1620, usually attributed to Swiss botanist Gaspard (or Caspar) Bauhin, who saw some growing in Sweden. This makes sense, since the common name comes from the Swedish rotabagge, “root bag.” It’s also variously known as the swede, the yellow turnip, or the turnip-rooted cabbage, though officially it has a species name all its own: Brassica napobrassica.
Rootabaga Country
Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories (1922) is collection of American fairy tales, first told to Sandburg’s three daughters and set in the fabulous Rootabaga Country, which is named after a turnip.
The swollen edible bottoms of both turnip and rutabaga are part stem, part taproot. The lower two-thirds, all root, lurks underground, while the upper third, derived from the stem base, remains above. The aboveground portion, exposed to sunlight, accumulates an assortment of purple and red anthocyanin compounds and becomes pigmented, while the shielded root remains pale: hence the familiar turnip’s purple top. The term turnip-pate, common in the seventeenth century, took into account only the snowy nether region, and was applied to individuals with very fair hair, those today called towheads or platinum blondes.
Both turnip and rutabaga are biennials, the starch-laden lower stem (hypocotyl) and root botanically intended for the nourishment of subsequent flowers and seeds. Turnip flowers, like those of the related cabbage, kohlrabi, kale, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and broccoli, are perfect flowers, which means that each blossom contains both male and female reproductive organs. These are usually cross-pollinated by proverbially busy bees. Turnips are occasionally known to jump the gun and flower the first year, a circumstance once viewed with alarm. John Gerard, commenting ominously upon it in 1633, said “the Turneps that floure the same year that they are sowen, are a degenerate kind, called Madneps, of their evill qualitie in causing frensie and giddinesse of the brayne for a season.”
In many western European languages, the turnip, like many other ostensibly sexless objects, possesses gender — masculine in French (navet), masculine in Spanish (nabo), feminine in German (Ruhe). This linguistic curiosity once led the touring Mark Twain to remark: “In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.”
There’s less overwrought reverence for the turnip nowadays. It comes in dead last on the National Gardening Association’s list of most popular American garden vegetables, and a lot of seed catalogs leap insouciantly from tomatoes to watermelons without a turnipward glance.
Some historians hypothesize that public repudiation of turnips is a holdover from World Wars I and II, when people periodically were condemned to live on nothing but. In the “Turnip Winter” of 1916–17, for example, due to Allied blockade and potato failure, starving Germans turned to turnips, transmogrifying them, with varying degrees of success, into everything from coffee to marmalade and bread. Food shortages in World War II Britain led to a resurgence of turnips, often baked into Woolton Pie, named after Frederick Marquis, Baron Woolton, the wartime Minister of Food.
“A horrible dish has appeared on the dining room table,” wrote an unhappy consumer, “and it is to be repeated once a week. It is called Woolton Pie. It is composed entirely of root vegetables in which one feels turnip has far too honoured a place.” One mother claimed that at the very mention of Woolton Pie, her six-year-old son would burst into uncontrollable sobs. Understandably, post-war everybody hated turnips, along with Spam, blackout curtains, and sirens.
But given what turnips have done for us, they deserve a whole lot better.