by Rebecca Rupp
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.
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NOTES
Vegetables In and Out of the Garden
Samuel Reynolds Hole’s thoughts on gardening can be found in his book Our Gardens (J. M. Dent & Co., 1899), available as a free e-book at www.onread.com/book/Our-Gardens-1068952.
Detailed statistics on American gardening can be found in the National Gardening Association’s “The Impact of Home and Community Gardening in America” (NGA, 2009), available in pdf format online at www.gardenresearch.com/files/2009-Impact-of-Gardening-in-America-White-Paper.pdf.
For information on vegetables and nutrition, see the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Information Center at http://fnic.nal.usda.gov. Other sources include: Duyff, Roberta Larson. American Dietetic Association Complete Food and Nutrition Guide, 3rd ed. John Wiley, 2006.
Guthrie, Joanne F., Claire Zizza, and Nancy Raper. “Fruit and Vegetables: Their Importance in the American Diet.” Food Review, Jan–June 1992.
The pejorative “rude herbs and roots” was originally mentioned in the Gesta Stephani (Deeds of Stephen), a mid-twelfth-century English history.
Robert Campbell’s strictures against the French appeared in The London Tradesman (1747), quoted in Seven Centuries of English Cooking by Maxime de la Falaise (Grove Press, 1992. First published 1973).
Food psychologist Paul Rozin points out the benefits of taking hot dogs (and milk chocolate) to a desert island in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food (Penguin, 2008).
Benjamin Franklin’s abortive experience with vegetarianism is described in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Yale University Press, 1964), and the history of Sylvester Graham and his food reforms can be found in Harvey Green’s Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society (Pantheon Books, 1986).
Joni Mitchell’s plea for getting back to the garden is in the song “Woodstock,” first issued in 1970 on the album “Ladies of the Canyon.”
Elizabeth, Countess von Arnim, is the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden, originally published in 1898, still available in several reprint editions.
A biography of Eliza Leslie and information about her cookbooks can be found at the Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project website at http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks.
Asparagus
Reports on the asparagus-worthiness of Martian soil come from the Phoenix Wet Chemistry Lab (WCL) at Tufts University. The WCL website is located at http://plan-etary.chem.tufts.edu/Phoenix/WetChemLab.html.
Apicius or De Re Coquinaria is the oldest known Roman cookbook, a collection of recipes dating to the first century CE, but first compiled in the late fourth c
entury. The author – though there is some debate over this – was purportedly Marcus Gavius Apicius, a flamboyant epicure who lived, ate, and threw lush parties during the reign of Tiberius. A translation of the surviving text can be found at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Apicius.
For all about hangovers, see Joan Acocella’s “A Few Too Many” (The New Yorker, May 26, 2008: 32–37).
For the anti-hangover efficacy of asparagus, see: Kim, B. Y., Z. G. Cui, S. R. Lee, S. J. Kim, et al. “Effects of Asparagus officinalis Extracts on Liver Cell Toxicity and Ethanol Metabolism.” Journal of Food Science, 74, no. 7 (September 2009): H204–H208.
For an account of the life of Ziryab the Blackbird, see Robert W. Lebling, Jr.’s “Flight of the Blackbird” in Saudi Aramco World, 54, no. 4 (July/August 2003): 24–33. The article can be found online at www.scribd.com/doc/22570702Flight-of-the-Blackbird-Saudi-Aramco-World-Jul-Aug-2003.
The complete text of Samuel Pepys’s diary is online at www.pepysdiary.com.
Euell Gibbons’s Stalking the Wild Asparagus (25th anniversary ed., Alan C. Hood & Co., 1987), a paean to returning to nature and eating from the wild, was popular among environmentalists in the 1960s and remains so today.
For the complete text of Marriott Edgar’s poem “Asparagus,” see www.poemhunter.com/poem/asparagus.
The text of Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, Or, Methodical Cook (Dover, 1993. First published 1824) is available online at www.fullbooks.com/The-Virginia-Housewife.html.
The story of Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle and his apoplectic guest is found in Waverley Root’s Food (Simon & Schuster, 1980).
Benjamin Franklin’s underpublicized “Fart Proudly” appears in: Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. (Carl Japikse, ed. Frog Ltd., 2003.)