59
Harvest & Holiday 2013
Escarpment Magazine
History...
Before there was agriculture, there was the turnip.
That’s how old the turnip is. Turnips were cultivated some 5,000
years ago and may have been eaten as long as 5,000 years before
that. Turnips were as important to the Romans as potatoes were to
the Incas. But while turnips are still used often in Europe, one would
hardly call them important today.
The history of the rutabaga is much shorter. In the early part of the
17
th
century, Swiss botanist Casper Bauhin crossed a cabbage with
a turnip and got a rutabaga, sometimes called a yellow turnip. It be-
came popular in northern Europe and, in fact, derives its name from
the Swedish rotabagge. (Rutabagas are sometimes called swedes.)
But the rutabaga hasn’t yet found similar success in North America.
Nor is it universally liked in Europe. The French, for example think
the rutabaga is not much better than animal feed.
Regardless of where the parsnip originated - there are estimates from
the Eastern Mediterranean to Northern Europe to Asia - it became a
popular vegetable with ancient Greeks and Romans, the latter often
preferring them for dessert with honey and fruit. The popularity of
parsnips spread to the rest of Europe and it remained a mainstay of
the European table until the potato supplanted it in the 18
th
century.
Parsnips came to America with English colonials but never reached
the kind of widespread appeal it once achieved in Europe.
*
There was a time
when asparagus wasn’t available in December, lettuce in January and zucchini in
February. It was a time - and this is most of recorded history in temperate climates - when people had to stock
up on the earth-toned vegetables of Fall to last them through the winter. No greens, few reds, but a lot of whites,
browns, yellows and oranges.
These are root vegetables for which a special place was made: the root cellar. We'll talk another time about
other root vegetables - potatoes, onions and the like - but this space is reserved for those hard-core root veg-
etables that aren’t quite as glamorous - turnips, rutabagas and parsnips.
Root vegetables are often referred to as lowly, more of an indication of their status than of their location. When
someone questions your intelligence, the appropriate response might be, "Hey man, I didn’t just fall off a turnip
truck." And then there are the stories of families so destitute they are reduced to eating turnips.
James Beard said that parsnips were one of our "most neglected" vegetables, though he personally loved them
and preferred them to sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving.
But root vegetables are experiencing a kind of renaissance. Not long ago, Joel Patraker, the Special Projects
manager of the Greenmarkets in New York City was waxing poetically on the radio about rutabagas. And
one of the signature dishes at the Union Square Cafe, one of New York City’s best restaurants, is creamy
mashed turnips (they actually use rutabagas) with crispy shallots. Chef Michael Romano says he also likes to
make parsnip pancakes as a side vegetable with roast venison.
So it looks like those subterranean Rodney Dangerfields are finally getting some respect. As the authors of the
fine book
The Essential Root Vegetable Cookbook
, Sally and Martin Stone, put it, "...we forget that the most expensive,
glamorous, exotic, rare and idealized foodstuff of all, the truffle, is truly a buried treasure." Treasure, indeed. I
hope this article on root vegetables is the shovel to help you dig up your own.
