Seven Top Turnip
Chef Steven Satterfield of Miller’s Union, Atlanta, is a champion of southern vegetables with a particular love of greens. Georgia had a particular weakness for “turnip salad” when it came to greens—in the menus prepared for the epic 1913 Georgia Products Dinners (the Chamber of Commerce’s campaign to have every county hold a feast featuring local ingredients exclusively)—turnip greens outnumbered collards and mustard combined. The demand for good quality greens was so great that vegetable breeders created turnip varieties with rudimentary roots and a profusion of greens. The most famous of these was the “Seven Top Turnip”. Like all turnips, the Seven Top in a biennial plant, but differs from the majority of varieties in lacking the bulbous subterranean stem. It is invariably planted in the fall for winter harvest. If ingested raw, the foliage is cut when it attains from six to nine inches in height. When cooked, the greens are allowed to grow up to two feet in height--this takes only 45 days to attain. While most turnip varieties were grown for animal fodder as well as human consumption, the Seven Top has been cultivated in the South since the 1830s exclusively for the human table. The greens are singularly rich in micronutriments-- vitamins and minerals. Ideal as a micro-green in modern cultivation schemes, or grown to full maturity in traditional produce stand produce gardening.
Turnip greens lack the acrid bit of mustard, or the gut-filling substantiality of collards. There have a mild touch of bitter, particularly the young raw leaves when used in a green salad. When cooked, they usually have some bacon, or jowl, or pig foot in the put to give the greens some slipperiness. The old purple top turnips sometimes had a bitter bite to the greens. Cooks added a pecan meat to the cook pot to counter this. But Seven Top turnips were so mild that this hack was not needed.
This July 28, 1840 advertisement in the Richmond Enquirer is the first notice in print of the Seven Top Turnip as a separate variety in an American newspaper. Because there is no explanation or notice that it is a new variety, one must presume that this greens Turnip had already been established as a market variety:
In the Twentieth Century vegetable breeders began producing new varieties of greens turnips that supplanted the heirloom in kitchen gardens: The Alltop—“known for its high yield and quick regrowth after harvest”—Topper—“ready for harvest only five weeks after germination . . . slow to bolt . . . resistant to the turnip mosaic virus”—The Shogoin Turnip—[A Japanese bred cultivar] “mild and tender . . . also produces an all-white root.” The Shogoin, the oldest of these latter day greening turnips, won particular favor among those who love turnip greens for salads, since it was the mildest tasting of all greens varieties. But none of the latter day varieties, for all their resistance to mosaic virus, matched the seven top for classic turnip salad flavor. And so the seed remains a fixture in the catalogs of heirloom seed companies, and so the variety was boarded on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste.