Sunday, January 20, 2013

"Words about some Turnips"







It may be winter but this week's still life of our market purchases rivals those of late summer. This time of year, turnips sometimes seem to plead pitifully from the market tables for you to buy them. Cheapened by their own abundance, turnips don’t get much respect. This has long been the case in part because, as one seventeenth-century writer about agriculture commented, “Turnips will grow on the meanest ground with little labor, & without muck.”  

Emily Cockayne, in her book Hubbub, explains that even in eighteenth-century England, turnips were disparaged precisely because they were so easy to grow. “The criers who touted exotic or seasonal foods on the city streets were more respected than those selling mundane ones such as turnips. Appearing for only two months a year, dill and cucumber purveyors enjoyed great popularity, unlike the scorned sellers of cabbages that were available all year and distinctly bucolic. Cabbages were unpopular and cheap” (93). Ditto turnips.
Perhaps this is why we have even found several English crimes associated with turnips, including a husband and wife who “had Words about some Turneps,” leading to a fight to the death (hers)
 
Valued as livestock feed and a cover crop, the turnip first graced the tables of the poor. As a consequence, as early as the first century writer Pliny, it was necessary to defend turnips as suitable “not onely for beasts of the earth and the Foules of the aire, but also for men." The sixteenth-century British apothecary John Parkinson both defends turnips as food for people and acknowledges that they are most often eaten by the poor: "Being boyled in salt broth, they all of them eate most kindly, and by reason of their sweetnesse are much esteemed, and often seene as a dish at good mens tables: but the greater quantitie of them are spent in poore mens feasts.”

The turnip turns up in many surprising places. Although one might more commonly hear a familiar proverb as being about a stone, it has also been common to say "you can't get blood out of a turnip." According to The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, a turnip, like a stone, often figures an "unyielding or unlikely substance," bloodless and inanimate. A thirteen-century folk tale called “The Turnip Tale” focuses on a turnip of enormous size. We’ve found many versions of a jest about turnips including one in which King James I gives a man a hundred pounds for a prodigiously large turnip. A courtier thinks to himself “if the King regards a Turnip so much, and rewards the Giver of it so nobly, how much more nobly will he reward me for a greater present?” He gives the king a race horse and the king rewards him with the turnip, which he presumes to be worth what he has paid for it.

But if the turnip makes its way into literature as both insensible and enormous, it has long been recognized that the tastiest turnips are the smallest. The popular seventeenth-century cookbook The French Cook explains “the lesser are the best, and most agreeable to the taste.” This history probably contributes to the emphasis on dainty little turnips on our market tables. The turnip also once had a versatility it now seems to lack. We’ve found recipes for supposedly toothsome, wholesome Turnip bread “which we have eaten at the greatest Persons Tables, hardly to be distinguished from the best of Wheat." Some early reader penciled "Turnip bread p. 71" on the flyleaf of the Huntington’s copy of John Evelyn’s Acetaria. A Discourse of Sallets (from 1699). So at least one reader was enthusiastic at the prospect. Turnips were also turned into cider, wine, oil (probably from the seeds, since the turnip is related to rape, the source of canola oil). Turnip roots and greens were also pickled and turned into soups of various kinds, which were deemed especially suitable in Lent.

The medical uses assigned to turnips are quite staggering. By various accounts, the turnip taken in various forms can increase breast milk, provoke urine, and “pricke forward to Venus," that is, act as an aphrodisiac. According to various herbals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the turnip can also suppress “noisome and troublesome dreames,” quell a cough and hoarseness, break up congestion, cure worms and scurvy, treat gouty or frostbitten feet, and temper steel. It is “sovereigne for eyes and Bees” and an antidote for poison. And yet, despite all of these claims for the turnip’s virtues, it remains in need of defense. As an example, look up turnip in the index of various cookbooks focused on vegetables and you will find that it makes rather a poor showing.

So, in honor of our research into the humble turnip, and its abundance at the market right now, we are committing ourselves to a few recipes featuring turnips. First, following our principle that what ends up in a market basket often constitutes a recipe, we roasted purple turnips, shallots, and apples together, dressed only in the usual olive oil, salt, and pepper. We peeled the apples, didn’t peel the turnips, and removed the papery skin from the shallots but left them whole. They looked lovely in the pan before they went in the oven. Roasting for about 45 minutes at 375 degrees faded the purple of the shallots and turnips, but they became beautiful in another way, burnished and soft.

To mention another easy possibility: we are convinced that a combination of bay-leaf and turnip complicates and improves split-pea soup, somehow making this humble recipe slightly strange and unfamiliar. This combination brings to light in a special way the slightly aromatic or "radishy" flavor of the turnip, and, along with the bay leaves, moderates the earthiness of the split peas.

Split pea soup with turnips, carrots and bay leaf
1 cup of split peas, picked over and rinsed
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 bunch of turnips, halved, quartered or diced (depending on their size)
2 carrots, chopped
2 bay leaves
6 cups of water or vegetable stock (we sometimes make a quick stock or savory "tea" from the trimmings of the onion and carrot we're using in the soup and use that as the liquid)

Brown the onion in olive oil for a few minutes.
Add the carrots and turnips and saute for a few more minutes
Add the split peas, bay leaf and stock.


Bring to a boil, turn down and simmer, partially covered, for about 1 1/2 hours or until the split peas are tender.

The thickness of the soup can be easily adjusted either by adding a little more stock to taste or simmering a little longer to thicken.

If neither of these recipes is quite suited to be the centerpiece of a king's feast, we're pretty sure neither should be a provocation to murder.

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