Ienvironment secretary Therese Coffey’s Recent Tip Britons should turn to turnips after tomato shortage didn’t go down As he would have expected.
In an attempt to revive interest in local produce, Coffey could have chosen a less glamorous root vegetable. But why do we now look down upon the faithful turnip – was it always so unpleasant?
It’s not clear when turnips were first eaten in Britain, but they haven’t always had a bad reputation. old english word neep – a name now only seen in Scotland with tatties and haggis – goes back to at least the 10th century, but the turnip (“turn-nip”) is only about 500 years old.
Historically, the term “turnip” referred not only to the round purple root, but also to root vegetables of various shapes, colors, and sizes. The sixteenth-century botanist John Gerard was particularly keen on “small turnips”, which he said were much sweeter than the larger kind and were grown outside London in a village called Hackney.
around the same time, Doctor Thomas Moffett Eager to write about the blood red turnips he ate in Prague, which were so “delicate” that the emperor himself grew them.
Importing new types of fruit and vegetables from Europe was an excitement for the early modern wealthy, who liked to show off their ties and turnip was no exception, Writers of the time weren’t much interested in where their “ordinary” or “garden” turnips came from, but they were happy to eat them nonetheless.
another botanist, john parkinson, wrote in 1629 that thanks to their sweetness, turnips were: “much esteemed, and often seen as a dish on the tables of good men”. In response to coffee, chef Thomasina Mears suggests Caramelizing Turnips in Butter, This is exactly the kind of sweet dish turnips were once lauded for.
early modern writers Also praised for their medicinal uses, Turnips were believed to be nutritious, restorative, and generally good for the body—even though they sometimes caused wind.
from humans to animal feed
So what happened to the turnip from the “good men’s table”? historians Francis Dolan And mark overton The animals point to fodder and crop circles. Turnips have been used to feed animals since ancient times, although Roman naturalists Pliny the Elder Insisted that they were just as good for human consumption.
Even though Gerard praised his Hackney turnips, he also noted that “the poor people in Wales” were forced to eat them raw in times of hardship. Up to this point, the root could be the food of both the rich and the poor. But from the late 17th century, growing winter turnips to feed livestock became more common and systematic crop rotation began, which used turnips as one of the main nutrients the plants provided.
Rotten turnips could feed animals and make great compost, but this didn’t exactly endear them to the aristocracy. At the same time, new root vegetables were arriving from America, potatoes and sweet potatoes is proving to be very popular.
Other now obscure but once favorite root vegetables – skirt and eringo – gradually fell out of the British diet and reduced the use of parsnips and carrots in sweet dishes, partly to account for the rapid increase in sugar production.
The global food chains that are at the heart of our current lettuce shortage mean that British consumers no longer need to eat (or personally produce) crops such as turnips out of necessity.
It is not surprising that the turnip has not been able to cope with the huge changes in agriculture and food preferences over the past three centuries. What their history shows, however, is that they’ve managed to survive in spite of it all, even if today’s consumers aren’t really sure What to do with them,
serin quinnPhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Warwick
This article is republished from Conversation Under Creative Commons Licence. read the original article,
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