Let me tell you something about turnips. The turnip has been getting a raw deal for the better part of three centuries, and I for one have had enough of it. Every other root vegetable has had its moment of fashionable rehabilitation — the parsnip is now darling of the gastropub set, the beetroot has been elevated to salad royalty, and the sweet potato appears to have been granted a permanent seat at every table in America. But the humble turnip? Still consigned to the back of the crisper drawer, still boiled to grey submission by cooks who never bothered to learn what it could become.
Well. Last Thursday evening I took six small turnips from the garden — the white Japanese variety, firm as apples, no bigger than a man's fist — peeled them, sliced them a quarter-inch thick, and laid them out on a sheet pan with a frankly irresponsible quantity of butter, a scattering of thyme, and enough salt to make a cardiologist weep. Into a hot oven, four hundred and twenty-five degrees, for thirty-five minutes. What emerged was a revelation. The edges had gone golden and crisp as a potato chip, the centres were tender and sweet as roasted chestnuts, and the butter had conspired with the thyme to produce something that tasted, improbably, like autumn itself.
This is what we've been missing. This is what three centuries of indifferent cooks have stolen from us. The turnip, when treated with proper respect, is not a melancholy boiled accompaniment to a Sunday roast. It is a vegetable of genuine complexity and charm. Roasted, it develops a caramelized sweetness that makes you understand why — in better times — it was prized as highly as the parsnip. The natural sugars concentrate and intensify, the flesh becomes almost creamy, and the edges, if you're paying attention, will take on the texture of something between a crisp and a chip.
But roasting is merely the beginning. Take those same turnips and dice them small — say, half an inch, no more — and braise them in beef stock with a bay leaf, some thyme, and a nob of beef marrow. Cover and cook low and slow for forty-five minutes. The turnips will absorb the flavour of the stock, the marrow will coat them in richness, and you'll have something that puts the average beef stew vegetable to shame. This is peasant cooking at its finest — the kind of dish that appears in old farmhouse cookbooks under such headings as "As they used to make it" or "The way grandmother prepared it." And do you know why? Because people understood then that the turnip, properly prepared, is not an economy measure but a choice.
I had a conversation with a market gardener some weeks ago who told me that she can barely give her turnips away. The customers come, they buy their beetroots and their fancy heirloom carrots, and they pass right by the turnips without a second glance. This is a tragedy of the modern palate. The turnip is not glamorous, but it is honest. It is not difficult, but it is rewarding. It asks only that you treat it with the consideration you would give to any other element of a dish — that you not boil it into submission, that you add salt and fat at appropriate moments, that you recognize its inherent sweetness and work with it rather than against it.
The turnip has built civilizations. It has sustained armies. It has fed peasants through winters that would have destroyed them otherwise. It deserves better than the reputation it has acquired. Seek out the small ones, the ones no bigger than a walnut. Treat them with butter and heat. Cook them properly. And then, if you still believe the turnip is a vegetable to be pitied, well — I suppose we cannot be friends. But I think, once you taste what a turnip can become, you'll find yourself wondering why it ever fell out of favor in the first place.