Swedes, neeps and turnips Following months of naive denial and
self-doubts, I have finally come to accept that what my Mother
told me about turnips wasn’t entirely correct. Don’t get me
wrong; it wasn’t her fault. Whether a case of geography or
possibly a case of self-enlightenment, it appears that here on
the West Coast at least, what I had grown up to believe was the
“turnip” is actually a rutabaga and the true turnip is a lovely
white and purple vegetable. The case of the turnip which is not
a turnip gets even more confusing when you further learn that
the rutabaga is also called a swede or a neep, depending upon
where you are from. This root vegetable definitely has an
identity problem. The turnip, and by this I do mean the white
and purple one, is thousands of years old. It once grew wild all
over what is now Europe and Asia. Although we normally include
it with the root vegetables, it is actually the thickened bulb-
like growth at the base of the stem of a plant belonging to the
same family as the cabbag