Toe in the Water

On Veggies

On Veggies

The enigma of the swede has vexed me for many a long year. Eventually resorting to Google, I discovered that they are a type of turnip, just as I had suspected. But, much more interestingly, they are the result of the crossing of a turnip with a cabbage.

I kid you not. It turns out that most of our vegetables are related and the result of cross breeding between each other. This particular family includes turnips, swedes, cabbages, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, rutabaga (rocket to us Brits) and many others, some of which I've never heard of. And they have been happily interbreeding with each other from Roman times at least, producing the amazing variety of veggies we know so well.

The swede is apparently a misnomer for it does not originate in Sweden. Nor does the sprout come from Belgium. They are just examples of the wonderful way we Brits manage to get the wrong end of the stick whenever forced to confront something foreign.

Oddly, the parsnip has nothing to do with the turnip, in spite of the similarity of their names (-nip derives from the Old English "neep", a word meaning root and still used in Scotland). Parsnips and carrots are the snobs of the vegetable world having remained aloof from the rest and creating their own more limited collection of variants.


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