Rutabaga

• 1. Introduction

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  The rutabaga has its own curling championship. A farmers' market in Ithaca, New York, stages the International Rutabaga Curling Championship every year, on the last day of its market season. In August, the villages of Askov, Minnesota, and Cumberland, Wisconsin, each hold a rutabaga festival of their own. This root vegetable in the Brassica family, a close relative of rapeseed, has earned real affection in some places. In other places and other decades, the very sight of it meant hunger. How did two different plants come together to produce it? Who first wrote it down, and why does one vegetable answer to so many names? And why do some people find it too bitter to swallow at all?

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• 2. A Cross Between Two Plants

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  In 1935, Woo Jang-choon published a finding about how the rutabaga came to exist. It began as a cross between the turnip, Brassica rapa, and the wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea. After the cross, its chromosomes doubled, which makes it what botanists call an allopolyploid. Its chromosome number is 2n = 38. The three-way link between these plants is known as the Triangle of U.

  In 1753, Carl Linnaeus gave the plant its first valid published name in his Species Plantarum. He treated it as a variety of cabbage, under the name Brassica oleracea var. napobrassica. Later botanists kept moving it around, sometimes as a variety, sometimes as a subspecies, and sometimes as a species in its own right. In 1768, a Scottish botanist raised it to full species rank in The Gardeners Dictionary.

  The Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin produced the earliest printed reference in his 1620 Prodromus. He noted that the plant was growing wild in Sweden. Many sources place its origin in Scandinavia, Finland or Russia. The Natural Resources Institute Finland, now called Luke, argues the plant was probably bred more than once in Northern Europe around the 16th century. Its studies found that the Finnish version, called lanttu, arose independently from the Swedish one. Both came from turnip and cabbage, in connection with seed cultivation.

  How it reached England is disputed. Some sources point to Germany and others to Sweden. John Sinclair wrote that it came from Germany around 1750. It reached Scotland by way of Sweden around 1781. An article in The Gardeners' Chronicle suggests wider English cultivation began in 1790. Reports of rutabaga crops in Illinois appear as early as 1817. In 1835, farmers in New York's Genesee River valley were urged to plant it as a fodder crop.

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• 3. A Root With Many Names

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  In Scotland, the word turnip means the rutabaga, and the vegetable also goes by tumshie and neep. Tumshie doubles as an insult for a foolish person. Neep comes from the Old English næp and the Latin napus. In Berwickshire and Roxburghshire, in the south-east, some people still say baigie, possibly a descendant of a Swedish dialect word.

  That Swedish dialect word is rotabagge, built from rot and bagge, and it gave North America the name rutabaga. In the United States the plant is also called Swedish turnip or yellow turnip. Across much of the Commonwealth, including the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, the shortened form swede is standard.

  The word turnip adds confusion. Northern and Midland England, the West Country, especially Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man and Canada all use it for the rutabaga. Elsewhere, turnip means the related white turnip, Brassica rapa ssp rapa. Some speakers lump both vegetables together under that one word, which also traces back to næp.

  Wales has three words, which vary by region: meipen, rwden and erfinen. In north-east England, turnips and swedes are colloquially called snannies, snadgers, snaggers and narkies, and snaggers is now archaic. On the Isle of Man, the rutabaga is moot, while the Manx word napin names the turnip.

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• 4. The Turnip Winter

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  Germany remembers the winter of 1916-17 as the Steckrübenwinter, the Turnip Winter. The Allied blockade had caused famine and shortages during the First World War. A stew called Steckrübeneintopf, made of nothing but rutabaga and water, became a typical meal. Hard times returned between 1945 and 1949, and the same stew came back with them.

  Because of those two periods, the rutabaga picked up a reputation as a food of last resort in both Germany and France. Many older Germans associate it with unhappy memories, and that history still shapes how some of them see the vegetable on their plate.

  In Poland, the Second World War brought a different, but related, experience. Rutabaga and rutabaga juice formed an important part of the local diet during those difficult days. People ate and drank them in large quantities.

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• 5. Northern Kitchens

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  In the Netherlands, rutabaga is traditionally boiled and mashed. Add mashed potatoes, and in some recipes other mashed vegetables or fruits, and the result is stamppot, which means mash pot. Cooks often serve it beside smoked sausage. In the southern low countries, down to and including Brussels, similar dishes go by the name stoemp.

  Sweden and Norway cook rutabaga with potato and sometimes carrot. They mash it with butter and either stock or, occasionally, milk or cream. Onion sometimes joins in. The Swedes call the puree rotmos, literally root mash, and the Norwegians call it kålrabistappe. In Norway, kålrabistappe is an obligatory side for festive dishes including smalahove, pinnekjøtt, raspeball and salted herring. In Sweden, rotmos goes with cured and boiled ham hock and mustard, in the classic fläsklägg med rotmos.

  Finland uses the vegetable more widely than anyone. Lanttulaatikko, the rutabaga casserole, is one of the three main Christmas casseroles, alongside the potato and carrot ones. Thin raw julienned rutabaga appears as a salad in school and workplace lunches, often with raisins or canned pineapple in light syrup. Many Finnish soup bases combine potatoes, carrots and rutabagas.

  Finnish cooks also roast, bake, boil and grill it. A home-cooking classic puts rutabaga, carrots, beetroots and potatoes in the oven with salt and oil. Karjalanpaisti, the Karelian hot pot, slow-cooks root vegetables and meat in a Dutch oven. Supermarkets sell root-vegetable chips, and in Savonia and Karelia there is a traditional dish called lanttukukko.

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• 6. Neeps, Cawl, and Pasties

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  At a Burns supper in Scotland, boiled and mashed neeps share the plate with mashed tatties, the Scots word for potatoes. Together they accompany the main course, haggis. Cooks boil roughly equal amounts of each in salted water and mash them with butter, with black pepper as an extra. Onions are never used. Mashed together, the two vegetables become clapshot.

  In England, swede is boiled with carrots, then mashed or pureed with butter and ground pepper. Cooks often keep the flavoured cooking water for soup or gravy. Swede is an ingredient in the condiment Branston Pickle. It is also one of the four traditional ingredients of the Cornish pasty.

  In Wales, swede is an essential part of cawl, the traditional lamb broth. A mash of just potato and swede is ponsh maip in the north-east, mwtrin on the Llyn peninsula and stwnsh rwden elsewhere.

  Australian cooks use swede to deepen the flavour of casseroles, stews and soups. In Canada it counts as a winter vegetable, since it keeps for several months in a cold place or cellar. Newfoundland serves it with Jiggs dinner. New Zealand grows it best in Southland, where winters are colder.

  In the American southeast, cooks cube and boil rutabagas with smoked meats as part of soul food. The New England boiled dinner sometimes includes them. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, pasties are everywhere. Each one holds diced or ground beef, diced potato, diced rutabaga, onion and seasoning, wrapped in pastry in a turnover shape.

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• 7. Bitter Chemistry

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  Cassava, maize, bamboo shoots, sweet potatoes and lima beans share a trait with the rutabaga. All contain cyanoglucosides, which release cyanide that the body then detoxifies into thiocyanate. Thiocyanate interferes with how the thyroid takes up iodide. At high doses, it competes with iodide inside thyroid tissue. If someone eats more thiocyanate-rich food than their iodine intake can balance, goitres may develop, and hypothyroidism can follow. Even so, there are no reports of harm in humans from normal amounts of Brassica vegetables.

  Glucosinolates make up around one percent of the dry matter in these vegetables, and they cause the bitter taste. A gene for the TAS2R bitter receptor decides how strongly a person tastes them. Sensitive people with the PAV/PAV genotype, the supertasters, find rutabaga twice as bitter as insensitive people with AVI/AVI. For the mixed PAV/AVI type, the difference is insignificant. Watercress, mustard greens, turnip, broccoli and horseradish provoke the same response.

  Other compounds shape flavour and smell, including glucocheirolin, glucobrassicanapin, glucoberteroin, gluconapoleiferin and glucoerysolin. Researchers have isolated several phytoalexins from the plant, which help it resist pathogens. Three of them were reported as novel in 2004.

  The root also carries a nutritional benefit. A 100 g portion contains 25 mg of vitamin C, which is 30% of the recommended daily dose.

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• 8. Fodder And Lanterns

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  In the early nineteenth century, farmers began growing swedes as a forage crop. The roots and tops fed livestock through the winter. Farmers chopped them or served them from a hopper. Animals could also graze the plants directly in the field.

  In the Middle Ages, rowdy bands of children roamed the streets in masks, carrying carved turnips that Scots called tumshie heads. People in Northern England, West England, Ireland and Scotland have long carved turnips into lanterns to ward off harmful spirits. Today they carve them to look as sinister and threatening as possible. They set them in a window or on the doorstep at Halloween.

  Pumpkins became readily available in Europe in the 1980s, and they have largely taken over that role. On the Isle of Man, though, children still carve turnip lanterns for Hop-tu-Naa, the Manx equivalent of Halloween. They light them with a candle or electric torch and carry them from house to house, singing the Hop tu Naa song and hoping for money or treats. The smell of burning turnip is an evocative part of the night.

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