They might not be exotic or imported, but there’s no shortage of recipes for this unsung hero of the vegetable world
Our greengrocer has tomatoes; I’ve seen them with my own eyes. But I’m not buying. For one thing, I’d rather not have to remortgage the house. For another, I’ve become slightly obsessed with turnips. And it seems I’m not the only one.
No sooner had a columnist made a Thérèse Coffey-inspired joke about turnip carpaccio than social media dished up a photograph of just such a dish, the veg in question deep purple and sliced so thinly it resembled the petals of a tulip. For inspiration, I turn to Colin Spencer’s 1992 classic, Vegetable Pleasures. It has recipes for turnips with ginger, and with walnuts, and also for a buckwheat pilaf starring the tiny young ones favoured by the French. Perhaps if we, too, called turnips navets, they might start to seem rather chic. It has been fun watching those who ordinarily like to drone on about seasonal eating rail against the disappearance of tomatoes and peppers from our supermarkets. The hypocrites! But yes, I know this is unfair. We’ve long imported bananas and pineapples; if you live on a dark, wintry island such as ours, to be deprived of fresh, exotic, vitamin-rich fruit is to experience a powerful longing. In 1944, the wartime diarist Vere Hodgson recorded that a shop near her flat in Notting Hill had got hold of some oranges (fruit and vegetables were not rationed, but they were often in painfully short supply). “We have seen orange peel in the street,” she wrote. And then: “Most refreshing even to look at it.”
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