The humble turnip began in Central Asia and ended up on coats of arms
Genetic studies place the first edible turnips in Central Asia several thousand years ago, where varieties remain the most diverse. From there the root spread west and east, fed Greeks and Romans, anchored an English farming revolution around 1700, and even became the heraldic emblem of a Salzburg archbishop.
The turnip is a subspecies of Brassica rapa, the same species that gives us bok choy, napa cabbage and rapini. Its white root, usually 5 to 20 centimetres across and up to a kilogram in weight, blushes purple, red or green on the shoulder where sunlight reaches it. That shoulder grows from stem tissue fused onto the root, and the leaves sprout straight from it without the neck a rutabaga has. The name may combine turn, as in rounded on a lathe, with neep, from the Latin napus.
Farmers in Europe and East Asia later selected turnips with bigger leaves, and the crop became a staple across the Hellenistic and Roman world. In ancient Jewish tradition it counted as food of the poor. In England, Charles Townshend earned the nickname Turnip by promoting a four-year rotation that let farmers feed livestock all year. Settlers on the American frontier valued it because greens appeared within weeks, and in the South the greens were boiled with salt pork, leaving a broth called pot likker served with crumbled corn pone.
The plant is biennial, storing food in its first year and flowering yellow in its second before dying. It prefers cool weather, since heat turns the root woody and harsh, and it typically reaches harvest 55 to 60 days after sowing. Where winters are too cold for roots to survive, seed growers lift and store them, replanting in spring.
Boiled greens are rich in vitamin K and lutein, while the root offers mostly water and a little vitamin C. In Austria's Wildschönau valley, farmers distil a pungent schnapps called Krautinger from a turnip variety, a right granted under Empress Maria Theresia. A golden turnip on red once formed the arms of Kiikala in Finland.
Source: Turnip
