Rutabaga
Sometimes the taste buds of hogs, cows, and sheep matter more than those of humans. Southerners wouldn’t be eating rutabagas if it weren’t for the fact that livestock thrive on them. Here’s the story. When the rutabaga (Brassica napobrassica) came into America from Europe it was immediately classified as a turnip, but soon took on an identity of its own. The name rutabaga literally means round root. It was a fixture of Swedish agriculture since the seventeenth century and first attracted attention in England in the 1740s by reformers interested in improving animal husbandry. The English political economist William Cobbett publicized the virtues of the plant during his 1816-1818 sojourn in the United States. American experimentalists began working intensively with the plant in the late 1810s with the intention of determining which was the most profitable and advantageous crop for a diversified farm--potatoes, sugar beets, mangel wurtzels, carrots, turnips, or rutabagas? As with most comparative explorations, the results varied depending on local circumstances. Rutabagas had certain advantages in cultivation: its growing season was shorter than the other roots; it could be manured by plowing in a clover field after the clover hay had been cut (most other roots required a major application of animal dung), it remained vital in the heat of midsummer; and it harvested more easily than mangel wurtzel. its disadvantages lay in its poor productivity in clay soils, its susceptibility to the insect pests that afflicted turnips, particularly the turnip fly, and its occasional toughness.
In South Carolina its first promoters were the feed boys, farmers looking for a root vegetable that provided ample and good winter feed for livestock. First of all it was big—not as big as a mangel wurtzel, but a whole lot better tasting. You can examine the old cook books—aside for a formula for mangel beer, you won’t find any widely republished recipes for this old German cattle beet. I suppose the real question among farmers was rutabaga or sugar beet. Neither stranged the flavor of milk in cows that fed on them over winter.
In the South there was no contest—rutabaga hands down. And every variety that come out—the Aberdeen, the purple top, the gold cabbage turnip—found takers. They were an autumn-winter crop, and Spring planted fields were rare indeed South of Virginia. The repertoire of dishes is rather broad: rutabaga appeared in many a beef or venison stew, it was braised, it was mashed with cream or buttermilk, sometimes with butter and garlic, it was cooked au gratin.
Raw, the roots do not look handsome. The pale orange grey-green skin is nondescript, sometimes homey, often sheeted with a protective layer of wax. Cutting the root raw takes your best knife and your gym trained muscles. There is an odor when it is cooked. Not quite “goose farts on a muggy day,” but old European kitchen.
The simplest way of preparing them, described in Theresa Brown’s Modern Domestic Cookery published after the Civil War, was to boil them whole, slice them, arrange them on a plate and pour salad dressing over them. More popular today is her formula for mashed rutabagas:
Rutabaga Turnips No. 2 Theresa C. Brown Modern Domestic Cookery (1871)
Pare off the rind; throw them into boiling water, sliced; boil them gently until tender; lift them out; press the water with a plate; then mash, and return them to a clean hot sauce-pan; stir in a large tablespoonful of butter; season with pepper and salt according to your taste (77).
This template gave rise to many variations. Garlic became a favorite additive in the mid-twentieth century. Some added buttermilk to the butter to give the mass more tang. Leftover mashed rutabagas were rolled into balls and deep fried as fritters. Edna Lewis made the consistency ultra-smooth in her recipe for “whipped rutabagas.” They remain a favorite root vegetable, cherished by some, liked by others. It has a minority of detractors as well. Southern chefs and food processors have become interested in fermenting the raw shredded root to make rutabaga kraut.
Sources: “Ruta-Baga,” Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs 10 (March 1837), 120. “Sugar Beet versus Rutabaga, The Farmer’s Cabinet (April 1840), 275. “Root Culture,” The American Farmer (December 13, 1843), 238. “Rutabagas for Milch Cows,” Southern Cultivator (July 1892), 334. “Rutabagas,” Southern Cultivator (July 15, 1905), 7. “How to Plant Rutabagas,” Southern Cultivator (August 15, 1905), 17. Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, “Whipped Rutabaga,” The Gift of Southern Cooking (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 129.