Turnip
The turnip (white turnip or summer turnip; Brassica rapa subsp. rapa) is a yellow-flowered plant with a white, edible taproot (called a turnip) and edible leaves, grown as a vegetable for people and as fodder for livestock. In some English-speaking regions, the word turnip refers to the closely related rutabaga. Turnip leaves are often eaten as "turnip greens" ("turnip tops" in the United Kingdom). Turnip greens, with various seasonings, are a common side dish in southeastern U.S. cooking.
Quotes
[edit]- HOLLAND BOILED TURNIP
Turnips, cut in ¾-inch dice, 1 quart.
Egg, 1.
Butter, ½ cup.
Lemon, large, 1.
Boil the turnips till tender in just enough salted water to prevent burning; drain and set in a covered dish on the side of the range, where they will keep hot but not burn. Melt the butter, add the beaten yolk with the eggs, juice the lemon, and a little salt. Serve a spoonful of this sauce over each order of turnip.- Edward Guyles Fulton, Vegetarian Cook Book: Substitutes for Flesh Food. Pacific Press Publishing Company. 1904. pp. 144–145.
- If the tale of agricultural improvement could be told in say two syllables, it would be those which spell turnips. To ask a farmer now-a-days to farm without turnips, would be like asking the Israelites of old to make bricks without straw; and yet there was a time, and not so far back in the history of this country, when turnips were as great a novelty as guano was in our own day. There were no turnips at no very remote period. Turnip husbandry is later than our first turnpike road. ...
... Turnips are the raw material of beef and mutton. Turnips have made us for a very great part of the year independent of grass, and have enabled us to go on feeding the whole year round. ...
But the good of turnip husbandry is not by any means confined to the production of beef and mutton. Turnips make manure, and manure makes corn. Turnips really and truly mean everything. Get but turnips, and all other things are added, or rather implied. The great value of guano and other portable manures is in enabling turnips to be grown. No man can tell how much turnip husbandry has augmented our annual product of corn.- W. Wealands Robson, (March 1890)"Turnip Husbandry". The Monthly Chronicle of North-Country Lore and Legend 4 (37): 101–102.
- As well as adopting the new crops, European farmers increased production by bringing more land under cultivation and developing new agricultural techniques. In particular, they introduced crop rotations involving clover and turnips (most famously, in Britain, the “Norfolk four-course rotation” of turnips, barley, clover, and wheat). Turnips were grown on land that would otherwise have been left fallow, and then fed to animals, whose manure enhanced the barley yields the following year. Feeding animals with turnips also meant that land used for pasture could instead be used to grow crops for human consumption.
- Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (pbk ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing USA. 2010. p. 125. 1st edition. New York: Walker & Company. 2009. ISBN 0-8027-1588-5.
- Food for the Ring-Dove.— One of my neighbours shot a ring-dove on an evening as it was returning from feed and going to roost. When his wife had picked and drawn it, she found its craw stuffed with the most nice and tender tops of turnips. These she washed and boiled, and so sat down to a choice and delicate plate of greens, culled and provided in this extraordinary manner.
- Reverend Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (3rd ed.). Allan Bell & Company. 1834. p. 294. (with notes by Captain Thomas Brown)
