I’ve been in the grip of something of a turnip obsession for a while now, a fixation sparked – I can hardly believe I’m writing this – by the former agriculture secretary, Thérèse Coffey, who responded to salad shortages in our supermarkets earlier this year with the instruction that rather than pining for off-season tomatoes, we should all learn to “cherish” the turnip instead. I know: as edicts go, this was laughable, even before we learned that the UK’s biggest turnip-grower, which also happened to be in Coffey’s Suffolk constituency, had recently given up on the crop, disheartened by the refusal of supermarkets to pay more for the vegetable in the face of rising costs. But still, I must admit it worked for me. Ever since, I’ve thought about turnips more than is either natural or entirely sane.
Such an obsession obviously involves finding good new things to do with turnips, a quest that has sent me back to books I’ve owned seemingly forever (I heartily recommend Colin Spencer’s Vegetable Pleasures, published the year I graduated from college, which includes a dashing – and delicious – recipe for turnips with walnuts, orange and parmesan). But mostly it has had me worrying away at the baffling question of demand. Even as supermarkets report an uplift in sales of less expensive meats, such as ox cheek and chicken liver, the poor old turnip continues to be denied a comeback. In farmers’ markets, many greengrocers and most restaurants, it is the Wally (as in Where’s Wally?) of vegetables. Spot one if you can.
Why so unfashionable? In France, le navet really is cherished. But at last, I’ve a proper answer to this question. In Stuffed, her fantastically well-researched, and extremely interesting, new history of feast and famine in Britain, Pen Vogler attributes the turnip’s slow demise to (and here, for reasons of space, I must simplify a bit) radical improvements in farming techniques. Once landowners grasped, some time in the early 18th century, that turnips could both be grown at scale, even on sandy land, and stored over the winter (which meant they could be fed to animals that would otherwise have to be slaughtered), the game was up: the old connection between the growing, cooking and eating of turnips by humans was severed, if not lost entirely. In the long term, they would henceforth be thought of as fodder rather than food; a thing for the barn, not the dinner table.
What a loss this was, and not only because such a fall from grace only further increased the British devotion to meat. Vogler writes captivatingly of a Tudor priest called Andrew Boorde, in whose 1542 book, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of Healthe, the turnip is held up as a quasi medicine, good both for the appetite and for the, er, augmentation of “the seede of man”.
Later writers, including the famous diarist and gardener John Evelyn, vouched for the delectable sweetness of the many garden varieties of turnip (some of which were eaten raw) and provided myriad recipes for them, including the classic French dish, duck with turnips, and a bread made with mashed and squeezed turnips. The favourite “sallet” of Charles I was turnip tops, boiled like asparagus, while another popular early 18th-century cookbook recommended cutting fried turnips into shapes like dice or cockscombs, the better to prettify the rims of soup plates.
All this was revelatory to me; henceforth, I fully intend to bore people with my newfound knowledge of Enlightenment crop rotation and its mournful consequences. But alas, I can’t say it has done much to alleviate my weird preoccupation. The opposite, in fact. In a minute, I’ll go down to the kitchen, where five pristine turnips – fat and purple and white, like miniature members of the House of Lords – await my attention (yes, I’m cheating: these are small, “spring” turnips, imported from Portugal, not big British winter ones). In Stuffed, Vogler notes a Victorian recipe for swede with ginger, a combination that chimes with Spencer, who believes the same spice to be a good match for the slight radish-like pepperiness of turnip – so maybe I’ll try that. The vegetables are steamed, and served with a sauce made from butter, grated ginger, honey, and the juice and zest of a lemon. How lovely: hardly turnip-like at all.
Kitchen Person by Rachel Cooke (W&N, £20). To buy a copy for £17.60, go to guardianbookshop.com
