I don't like turnips
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
"They are often considered to be rather a boring low-class vegetable - at the very least one that can taste strong and coarse"
Beverley Sutherland Smith
We never really had turnips on their own when we were children but they did appear in stews. I was not a fan - not the extreme of hatred, but I would avoid them if I could. Interestingly I hated their close cousin swedes much more. Today I still don't go for turnips - considering them somewhat tasteless and not worth the money you have to shell out for them - but I really rather like swedes. Odd how our tastes change over the decades isn't it?
Nigel didn't like them either, but that's probably because they were served with no finesse whatsoever in school dinners - 'a plate of hate' he called them - and always the turnips they used were large - River Cottage's Mark Diacono says they should be 'snooker rather than cricket ball' size - and as Beverley Sutherland Smith - and everyone else - says: "they are let grow too large and then they can be unpleasant."
I'm not quite sure why I listed turnips in my Ideas list - maybe it was on seeing this very exotic looking Turnip cake in Yotam Ottlenghi and Ixta Belfrage's book Flavour, although I wasn't tempted to try it because - well it was turnip. Having checked it out today I now discover that this is a Chinese dim-sum dish and not made from turnip at all - but another close cousin Daikon radish. The other picture is of Jamie Oliver's - probably bastardised version which he calls Crispy turnip cake. When I was looking for pictures of turnip cake I could see that it was a big thing in China - so it probably deserves a post all of its own.
An interesting fact though, that I found in Bert Greene's Greene on Greens - was that it is:
"Probably the oldest vegetable known. ... According to evidence uncovered in the caves at Choukoutien, near Peking, turnip was not merely eaten raw by its first consumers; it was roasted with meat (on flat stones in the fire) or wrapped up with fern ends or wild onions and steamed in flat wet leaves. One thing about the turnip is fairly self-evident: it was eaten because it was available."
How interesting I thought that those incredibly early humans thought to flavour their turnips with fern ends and wild onions. Of course originally they ate them raw, but it seems that they also wanted to make them taste better.
Nigel Slater tells us that: "Part of its problems may stem from the fact that it has always been used as animal fodder." which is interesting, because Mark Diacono tells us he first became interested in cooking them because of the way his pigs, discarded the leaves but ate every last scrap of the root.
Those leaves by the way - or another variety that focuses on the leaves rather than the root - is broccoli rabe, which is much loved by the Italians - particularly with orecchiette pasta.
If you grow your own - or if you are indeed tempted to cook them - first make sure you have those small ones, and then try one of the following very simple methods of cooking them.
Nigel Slater actually credits Elizabeth David with his first beginnings of interest in this unloved vegetable with her recipe for Navets glacés. Below is a summary of her recipe shown here in the book Elizabeth David on Vegetables:
"Boil 10-15 minutes, reserve a little of the water. Put into buttered dish, sprinkle with caster sugar, more butter on top and 2-3 tablespoons of cooking water. Cook on low heat until sauce turns brown and slightly sticky. Spoon a little of glaze over and serve as they are."
She also had a slightly different version, which Nigel adapted and called Golden turnips with butter and sherry - though we shouldn't forget the dill which he added "because it works with other root vegetables." It's not online, so I copied it out for you:
"I cut each round root into six from stalk to tip, put them in a heavy-bottomed pan with a thick slice of butter, a pinch of fudge-coloured organic sugar, black pepper, a splash of sherry and some snipped dill. They sit over a low flame covered with a puttering lid, till soft enough to crush between finger and thumb."
The simple approach school of recipes continues with this Roasted turnips with miso butter from Hayden Quinn/delicious. and Ottolenghi's Spicy turnips which are similar in method but with possibly more adventurous flavourings.
They do all look delicious, but I wonder whether they taste good too. I just cannot get over my early dislike, and later boredom.
And perhaps here I should add this recipe for Turnip Tots - Newrdcook/Food 52 whose author said it was inspired by Jamie Oliver, but I don't know what the source of inspiration was. These are boiled cubes of turnip which are then coated in breadcrumbs and flavourings before being fried.
Nigel has a few more recipes in his book Tender Volume 1 - the most interesting one of which - to me anyway - was A sweet and sticky casserole of duck with turnips and orange which has no picture online. Suffice to say it also involved marmalade. However I later found that somebody had indeed made it - a lady called Jenny Reese who was not a fan:
"On Tuesday, I am scraping Nigel Slater's revolting duck, marmalade, and turnips casserole into the garbage and mentally composing my resignation letter from Project Tender."
Was that her fault, or Nigel's? Maybe a bit of both. It came from an article about Nigel's Tender Volume 1 book and she had several things to say about him and his recipes, some of which I grudgingly, maybe even guiltily agreed with. One example being this:
"Slater may in fact be cosmopolitan and polished, but I picture him as a hobbity eccentric in a cardigan and soft-soled shoes who futzes around a thatch-roofed cottage scooping marmalade into his pot of braised duck, currant jelly into his stew, and grated beets into his cakes. He is definitely weird. I like that. Sometimes his freaky ideas work and sometimes they are just horrendous, but interacting with this book is always interesting. I've never had a cookbook experience quite like this one."
She's sort of right. I don't think I've ever felt like throwing any of his dishes in the bin, and like her, I think that some of his dishes are incredibly delicious , but some have been somewhat underwhelming. He's not as reliable as Robert Carrier or Delia Smith. And yes, much as I adore his writing, maybe, in my critical moments - a little bit 'precious'.
But today it's turnips - not Nigel - he just happened to be a useful source of recipes. There are actually lots of recipes for turnips out there, but I still just can't get over that boring verging almost on dislike feeling that I have about them and most of those recipes either did not tempt, or were recipes in which the turnips were just the bit players. Besides, although they might have been a food so cheap and available that it was fed to animals, these days it's pricey in the supermarkets, and more likely to be found on upmarket restaurant menus.
The last word goes to somebody called Sophie Morris on the Love Food website:
"In trying to find value in the humble turnip, it’s worth considering that they do, at least, exist: this means they must have some invaluable characteristics, otherwise market forces would surely have consigned them to history."
Which is undeniably true. I just don't know what those 'invaluable characteristics' are.
YEARS GONE BY
June 24
2021 - Missing
2020 - Missing
2018 - What to do with failure
2017 - On holiday
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