Brassica rapa subsp. rapa (the European turnip); together with the East Asian turnips of Brassica rapa (the Japanese kabu, including the large Shogoin) and the leafy turnip-greens grown from the same species (cime di rapa or broccoli rabe, the Iberian grelos and nabiças); to be distinguished from the swede or rutabaga, Brassica napus, the larger yellow root widely called 'turnip' in Britain
Origin: The temperate belt of the Old World, with the turnip and the oilseed forms arising in the Near East and around the eastern Mediterranean, and the East Asian leafy and turnip forms domesticated separately in China; the wild <em>Brassica rapa</em> ranges across Europe, the Near East, and Central Asia
The turnip is one of the oldest and least glamorous of all the cultivated vegetables, the staple root of the Old World poor for the better part of three thousand years before the potato came from the Americas to displace it. Botanically it is Brassica rapa, a single species put to a remarkable variety of uses: the swollen, white-and-purple root that is the turnip proper; the tender leaf, eaten as a green; the flowering shoot, eaten as cime di rapa; and the small black seed, pressed for one of the oldest of vegetable oils. It belongs to the cabbage family and to the same species as several Asian vegetables that look nothing like it, the pak choi, the Chinese cabbage, the mizuna, and the choy sum, all of them forms of the one plastic and willing plant.
Unlike the almond or the pomegranate, the turnip was almost certainly domesticated more than once. The genetic evidence points to at least two independent beginnings: a western one, around the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean, which gave the European turnip and the turnip-rape oilseed; and an eastern one, in China, which gave the leafy vegetables and the East Asian turnips. From the western cradle the root turnip spread the length of Europe and the Near East; from the eastern cradle the kabu of Japan and the manjing of China descend. The turnip's varieties, all forms of the one species, are still used substantially and distinctly in the kitchen today: the round white purple-topped European turnip; the small, sweet, fine-grained Japanese kabu, and the great Shogoin of Kyoto from which the senmaizuke pickle is shaved; the heritage Teltow turnip of Brandenburg, a finger-sized delicacy once praised by Goethe; and the leafy turnip-greens, the cime di rapa of Puglia, the grelos and nabiças of Galicia and Portugal, and the turnip greens of the American South.
A persistent confusion must be cleared away, for it runs through the English language. The swede, or rutabaga, the large, dense, yellow-fleshed root that the Scots call the 'neep' and the Cornish the 'turnip', is not a turnip at all but a separate species, Brassica napus, a relatively recent cross between the turnip and the cabbage. The dishes of the British north that are made with 'neeps', the bashed neeps beside the haggis, the Orkney clapshot, the swede in the Cornish pasty, are swede dishes, not turnip ones; the true turnip, Brassica rapa, is the smaller, faster, more delicate root of this entry.
For the whole of antiquity and the Middle Ages the turnip was, across the temperate Old World, what the potato would later become: the cheap, bulky, reliable root that filled the winter belly of the poor and fed their beasts besides. The Greeks grew it as the gongylis and the Romans as the rapa and the napus; Pliny the Elder ranked it among the most important of all crops after the cereals and the bean, and the Romans carried it, with their roads and their farms, the length of their empire, into Gaul, Germania, Hispania, and Britannia, where it became a fixture of the northern field and the northern pot. Through the medieval centuries the turnip and its greens were the standby of the European peasant, boiled into pottage, mashed with butter, and stored through the cold months, until the potato arrived from the New World and, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pushed the turnip down the table and out into the field.
That banishment to the field was, paradoxically, the turnip's most consequential moment. In the agricultural revolution of eighteenth-century England the turnip became the engine of the Norfolk four-course rotation, the great improvement, associated with Charles 'Turnip' Townshend, by which fields once left fallow were sown instead with turnips to feed cattle and sheep through the winter, allowing the herds to be kept alive rather than slaughtered each autumn, manuring the land, and lifting the yields of the grain that followed. The humble fodder turnip thus underwrote the population growth that made the Industrial Revolution possible, the least romantic of vegetables at the root of the modern world.
Eastward and southward the turnip kept its place at the table where the potato never wholly conquered. In the Levant the white turnip is pickled with a slice of beetroot into the brilliant pink torshi lift that stands beside every plate of falafel and shawarma; in Persia the shalgham is simmered into winter soups and eaten with honey against the cold; in the Punjab and Kashmir it is the shalgam of the winter curry and the slow-cooked shab deg. In East Asia, where the leafy and turnip forms of Brassica rapa were raised separately, the kabu became one of the gentle, beloved vegetables of the Japanese kitchen, simmered in dashi and shaved into the great Kyoto pickle senmaizuke, and one of the seven herbs of the new-year rice porridge. And wherever Europeans carried the turnip, its greens went with it: into Galicia and Portugal as grelos and nabiças, and across the Atlantic into the American South, where turnip greens stewed with a smoked ham hock became one of the soul-food greens of the region.
The turnip is today a quietly global vegetable that has never quite recovered the central place it held before the potato, yet has never disappeared either, surviving in three distinct guises: the root, the green, and the pickle. As a root it is humblest in the West, a cheap winter vegetable for the stockpot, the pot-au-feu, and the lamb navarin, redeemed at the fashionable end by the small, sweet young turnips glazed in butter and the baby kabu of the modern restaurant. As a green it is a genuine staple still, the cime di rapa of the Puglian orecchiette, the grelos of the Galician pot, and the turnip greens of the American South, prized for the iron-rich, faintly bitter leaf and the 'pot likker' it leaves behind. As a pickle it is indispensable across the Near East, the shocking-pink torshi lift of the Levantine table being one of the most recognisable pickles in the world.
In the East the turnip keeps a gentler, more refined place. The Japanese kabu is simmered whole in a clear dashi until translucent, shaved paper-thin into the lacquered rounds of the Kyoto senmaizuke, salted into everyday tsukemono, and folded, as suzuna, into the seven-herb porridge eaten on the seventh day of the new year for health. In China the turnip and its preserved forms, the salty dàtóucài among them, season the noodle bowl and the congee; in the Indian north the shalgam is a winter curry and the heart of the Kashmiri shab deg. From the engine of the agricultural revolution to the jewelled pink pickle and the delicate simmered kabu, the turnip remains, five thousand years on, one of the most widely grown and quietly useful of all the vegetables the Old World tamed.
Historical Journey of Turnip
The Near East and the Iranian Plateau — c. 2000 BCE
The western turnip was domesticated from the wild Brassica rapa across the Near East and the lands around the eastern Mediterranean, where the same plant gave two crops at once: the swollen root that is the turnip, and the small oily seed of the turnip-rape, one of the oldest of all the pressed vegetable oils. From this cradle the turnip became a staple of the ancient Near Eastern field and pot, a cheap and reliable winter root grown long before the potato existed, and it has kept its place in the Persian kitchen to this day. The Iranian plateau, on the eastern edge of the homeland, treats the shalgham as a vegetable of winter and of health: simmered into the thick herb-and-pulse pottages called ash, stewed with meat, and, most distinctively, boiled or steamed soft and eaten with honey or sugar as a folk remedy against the coughs and colds of the cold months, a sweet, warming dish given to children and invalids across Iran.
The turnip's very humbleness made it, in this its homeland as everywhere else, the food of plain living and hard winters, but the Persian table raised it without apology into soups and stews of real depth, where its faint, clean bitterness and its soft sweetness balance the sourness of the herbs and the richness of the meat. From here the turnip would travel east along the trade roads into Central Asia and the Indian north, and west into the Levant, Greece, and Rome.
The Fergana Valley, Central Asia — c. 1000 BCE
Carried east out of the Near East along the corridors that would become the Silk Road, the turnip took firm root across Central Asia, where the wild Brassica rapa also grows and where the hardy, drought-tolerant, frost-resistant root suited the harsh continental climate of the steppe and the irrigated valleys alike. Among the settled farmers of the Fergana Valley and the oasis cities of Transoxiana the turnip became one of the standing vegetables of the great communal meat soups, the foundation of the Central Asian table.
It is in shurpa, the rich, clear, long-simmered soup of mutton or beef and whole chunks of vegetable that is eaten from Uzbekistan to the Caucasus, that the Central Asian turnip is most at home: quartered and dropped into the pot with the carrot, the potato, and the onion, it lends the broth its faint sweetness and its clean, earthy depth, soaking up the fat of the lamb. From this Central Asian crossroads the turnip would pass south over the mountains into the Punjab and Kashmir, and the same plant, domesticated separately at the far end of Asia, would meanwhile be raised by the Chinese into the vegetables of the East.
Damascus and the Levant — c. 500 BCE
In the Levant the turnip, the lift, found one of its most enduring and most visible homes, not as a cooked root but as a pickle. The white turnip, cut into batons and packed into brine with a single slice of beetroot, takes up the beet's colour over a week or two and turns a brilliant, shocking, translucent pink: torshi lift, the pickled turnip that is one of the most recognisable preserves of the whole Near Eastern table. It stands beside the falafel and the shawarma, the grilled meats and the mezze, of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and beyond, its sharp, crunchy, fuchsia-pink batons cutting the richness of the fried and the grilled with a clean acidity.
The pickle belongs to the wider Levantine art of the torshi and the kabees, the brined and soured vegetables that fill the winter larder and brighten every plate, and the turnip, cheap and abundant and willing to take the beetroot's dye, is its most beloved subject. Beyond the pickle jar the turnip is stewed in the oil-braised winter vegetable dishes of the Levantine kitchen, but it is as the pink torshi lift that it is known to the whole world.
Rome and the Italian Peninsula — c. 100 CE
The classical Mediterranean held the turnip in an esteem that its later humbleness makes hard to credit. The Greeks grew it as the gongylis, and Rome made of the rapa and the napus one of the foundations of the plain table: Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, ranked the turnip among the most important of all crops after the cereals and the vine, praising it as food for man and beast alike, and Columella and the other agricultural writers gave careful instructions for its sowing. The Romans boiled it, pickled it in vinegar and mustard, and carried it, with their farms and their legions, the length of the empire, into Gaul, Germania, Hispania, and Britannia, planting it across the whole of temperate Europe as a winter staple that would outlast Rome itself.
Italy has never let the turnip go, and keeps it above all in the form of its greens. Cime di rapa, the flowering shoots and leaves of the turnip, faintly bitter and deeply savoury, are the defining green of Puglia, where they are blanched and tossed with orecchiette, garlic, chilli, and anchovy into orecchiette con le cime di rapa, one of the great peasant pasta dishes of the Italian south. From the Roman diffusion the turnip and its greens passed into the field and the kitchen of every European land.
The North China Plain — c. 500 BCE
At the far eastern end of Asia the wild Brassica rapa was taken into cultivation a second time, wholly apart from the Near Eastern domestication, and the Chinese raised from it a great family of vegetables: the leafy pak choi and Chinese cabbage, and the turnip itself, the manjing or wujing, a root crop of real antiquity in the north. The turnip was important enough in early China to be the subject of imperial edicts promoting its cultivation as a guard against famine, for it grew quickly, stored well, and could be salted to last the winter.
The Chinese turnip is eaten cooked in soups and stews, but its most characteristic form is the preserve. Cut, salted, sun-dried, and cured, the turnip becomes dàtóucài, the firm, dark, intensely savoury salt-pickled turnip of the southern and western provinces, chopped into the noodle bowl and the rice congee, stir-fried with chilli, and eaten as a sharp, crunchy relish with plain rice. From this eastern cradle the turnip, and the whole idea of the leafy and rooted Brassica rapa, passed onward across the sea to Korea and Japan.
Kyoto and the Kinki Region, Japan — c. 700 CE
The turnip reached Japan from China in early times and became the kabu, one of the oldest and gentlest of the vegetables of the Japanese kitchen, valued for the soft, fine, faintly sweet flesh of its small white root and for its tender leaf. It is named among the earliest cultivated vegetables of the country, and it holds a place of quiet honour in the calendar: as suzuna, the turnip is one of the seven herbs of spring, the nanakusa, gathered and simmered into the rice porridge eaten on the seventh morning of the new year for health and long life.
The Japanese treat the kabu with the restraint that suits its delicacy. It is simmered whole and slow in a clear dashi until it turns translucent and yielding, in kabu no nimono, the broth barely seasoned so that the sweetness of the root comes through; it is salted lightly into everyday tsukemono; and, most spectacularly, the great Shogoin turnip of Kyoto, a giant of the kind that can be the size of a dinner plate, is shaved into translucent rounds and layered with kombu and chilli and a sweet-sour brine into senmaizuke, the 'thousand-slice pickle', one of the three great pickles of Kyoto and a delicacy of the winter season. In Japan the most ordinary of the world's roots is treated as something fine.
Galicia and North-Western Iberia — c. 1500 CE
The turnip, planted across Hispania since Roman times, found in the cool, wet, green north-west of the Iberian Peninsula a country that suited it as well as any in Europe, and Galicia and northern Portugal made of the turnip and above all its greens a cornerstone of their cooking. The grelos of Galicia and the nabiças and grelos of Portugal, the leaves and flowering tops of the turnip, slightly bitter and full of iron, are the winter green of the region, grown in every kitchen garden and sold in great bundles through the cold months.
The Galician table pairs the grelos, in its classic and beloved form, with the cured foreleg of the pig: lacón con grelos, the salt-cured ham hock boiled long and slow with the turnip greens, with chorizo and waxy potatoes, is the great winter and carnival dish of Galicia, a whole pot of pork, green, and root that is among the most representative meals of the region. The same greens go into the caldo gallego, the soothing white-bean, potato, and greens soup that is the everyday broth of the Galician home. From Iberia the turnip and the habit of eating its greens would cross the Atlantic into the Portuguese and Spanish New World.
The Punjab and Kashmir, North India — c. 1600 CE
The turnip came into the Indian north over the mountains from Central Asia and Persia, carried with the Persianate culture of the Mughal world, and it kept its Persian name, shalgham, which is the shalgam of Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi to this day. In the cold-winter north-west, the Punjab and the vale of Kashmir, where the root grows sweet and dense, the turnip became a true winter staple, one of the few fresh vegetables of the cold months and a fixture of the home kitchen.
In the Punjab the turnip is the shalgam of the everyday winter sabzi, peeled, cubed, and cooked down with onion, tomato, ginger, and the warm spices until soft and lightly caramelised, a homely, deeply seasonal dish eaten with hot rotis. In Kashmir it rises to grandeur in shab deg, the 'night pot', a slow-cooked feast dish in which turnips and meat, lamb or mutton meatballs among them, are simmered together through the whole of the night over a low fire until the turnips have all but melted into a rich, fragrant, saffron-and-spice gravy, a dish of the Kashmiri winter feast that is as much the turnip's as the meat's. In the Indian north the most ordinary of roots is both daily food and festival dish.
Paris and the French Countryside — c. 1650 CE
France took the humble Roman turnip, the navet, and gave it a place in a cuisine that, unlike most, never wholly disdained it. The classic French kitchen treats the turnip with care as a vegetable of body and sweetness, and built around it two enduring dishes. In the great boiled dinner of pot-au-feu, the turnip joins the carrot, the leek, and the celery among the bouquet of root vegetables that flavour the long-simmered beef broth and are served alongside the meat, the navet lending the pot its faint, clean sweetness. And in the navarin, the braised stew of lamb that is one of the cornerstones of bourgeois French cooking, the turnip is the defining vegetable: the navarin printanier, the 'spring' navarin, is studded with young turnips, baby carrots, peas, and small potatoes, but it is the turnip that gives the dish its name and its character.
The French also perfected the most flattering of all treatments of the root, the navets glacés, young turnips turned smooth, simmered in butter, stock, and a little sugar until the liquid reduces to a glossy glaze that coats them, sweet, tender, and shining. From the French table the turnip kept its dignity as a vegetable worth cooking well, not merely a root to fill the belly.
Norfolk and Eastern England — c. 1730 CE
The turnip had grown in Britain since the Romans planted it, a winter root of the cottage garden and the pottage pot, but it was in eighteenth-century Norfolk that the humble vegetable changed the course of world history. In the agricultural revolution of the period the turnip became the engine of the Norfolk four-course rotation, in which fields once left fallow every third year were instead sown with turnips to feed cattle and sheep through the winter; the practice, championed by Charles Townshend, who earned the lasting nickname 'Turnip' Townshend, allowed livestock to be overwintered rather than slaughtered, manured and rested the land, and lifted the grain harvests that followed. The fodder turnip thus underwrote the rise in food and population that made the Industrial Revolution possible.
At the British table the true turnip, as distinct from the larger swede that the Scots confusingly call the 'neep', is eaten young and small as a spring and early-summer vegetable, glazed in butter or boiled and mashed, and its leafy tops are gathered as a green. Turnip tops, the tender young leaves and shoots, are a traditional vegetable of the English West Country, boiled and dressed with butter or, in the old country way, fried up with bacon, the faint mustard bitterness of the leaf set against the salt fat of the pork. It is a reminder that the root the agricultural improvers fed to their cattle was, at the cottage door, eaten leaf and all.
Teltow and Brandenburg, Germany — c. 1740 CE
The German lands grew the turnip, the Rübe, as a winter staple from Roman times, but Brandenburg raised one form of it into a genuine delicacy. The Teltower Rübchen, the 'little Teltow turnip', a small, slender, finger-sized turnip grown in the poor, sandy soils south of Berlin around the town of Teltow, develops in that lean ground a sweet, nutty, intense flavour quite unlike the watery field turnip, and became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a prized speciality of the Prussian and Berlin table. Goethe loved them and had them sent to him in Weimar; Frederick the Great's court and the grand kitchens of Berlin held them in high regard, and they remain a protected regional rarity to this day.
The classic preparation is the simplest that will flatter so fine a root: the little turnips are peeled, lightly browned in butter with a pinch of sugar, and braised in stock until tender and glazed, sometimes finished with a dusting of flour to bind the sauce, served as a refined vegetable dish beside roast meats. Beyond this jewel of the Brandenburg garden, the turnip and the swede fed the German winter at its hardest, never more grimly than in the 'turnip winter' of 1916–17, when the failure of other crops left the people of wartime Germany dependent on little else; but the Teltower Rübchen stands at the opposite pole, the turnip as a thing of delicacy and pride.
The American South — c. 1750 CE
English and other European colonists carried the turnip to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where it grew readily and became a standby of the kitchen garden, root and green alike. It was in the American South, and above all in the cooking of enslaved African Americans and their descendants, that the turnip's green found its greatest expression. Turnip greens, the leaves of the plant grown as much for the top as the root, became one of the defining 'greens' of Southern and soul-food cooking, beside the collard and the mustard.
The greens are stewed long and slow with a piece of smoked, cured pork, a ham hock or a length of streaky bacon, with onion and a little heat from chilli or vinegar, until they are meltingly tender and dark; the deeply savoury, smoky cooking liquor they leave behind, the celebrated 'pot likker', is prized above the greens themselves, sopped up with cornbread and once valued as a nourishing tonic. Turnip greens with their pot likker, often cooked together with the diced root, are a fixture of the Southern table and of the New Year, eaten with black-eyed peas and cornbread for luck and prosperity, the humble leaf of the European poor made into one of the soul foods of the American South.
