In Praise of the Humble Turnip

 

Do you remember the nursery rhyme about wishes and horses, and turnips and watches? It goes like this: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. / If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side.”

When I was a child, those verses appealed to me. I loved horses and would have liked nothing better than to wish one into existence. As for the turnip, I was learning to tell time, following the hands on a clock as they clicked off the minutes, travelling around the dial. Believing all things possessed magical qualities, if I could have just put my hands on a turnip, I was sure I could turn it into a watch.

But I never found one. In my family, we didn’t eat turnips. I’m not sure I would have known how to recognize one if I stumbled across it. Later in life, I saw turnips piled in bins at the supermarket, dull, bumpy white balls, looking none too fresh. I’d have taken a sturdy brown potato any day, especially as my mother made the best mashed potatoes around.

My prejudices against the turnip held on for much of my life and to be honest, only recently have I overcome them completely, thanks in part to covid-19 and the ensuing restrictions on daily life imposed in France.

Since last May 19^th, there has been a slight letup. The French have been able to reunite with one of their most beloved institutions: the sidewalk café. After being deprived for over a year—except for a brief interval last summer and early fall, they can once more sit down at a café terrace to enjoy a drink, a meal, a chat with friends.

 

During the long months when cafés were closed, many café and restaurant owners proposed alternatives to sitting outside at a marbled-topped table to sip a drink and watch the world go by. Some put in place ambitious take-out menus. Others sold drinks at a makeshift counter blocking entry to the café. There was just one problem. Customers did not have the right to linger; they had to take their drink or meal and go. Otherwise, the café owner could have problems with the law.

Some opted for another solution, my personal favorite, that brings me back to the humble turnip. In my neighborhood, a couple of cafés turned their terraces into farmers markets, renting sidewalk space to what the French call “maraîchers,” what Americans call “truck farmers,” who produce fruits and vegetables to sell close to home. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the term referred to small farmers on the outskirts of Paris who raised vegetables on marshy plots near the capital (marais, the root for the word maraîcher, = marsh). 

As the suburbs of Paris expanded, the vegetable farms disappeared, yet some held on till the end of the 20^th century. Next to the university where I taught in the suburban town of Saint-Denis, there was a truck farm right across the street and at a local supermarket, I bought vegetables grown a few feet from where I worked. Today, that same piece of land is a metro station, a student residence, and the National Archives of France.

These past months, I became the regular customer of a maraîcher selling his produce at a café located at the foot of a public stairway, the extension of one of the most romantically named streets of Paris, Passage des Soupirs, Passage of Sighs. I stopped by at least twice a week, always eager to discover his wares. Fresh spinach or asparagus, spring onions, wild garlic, Batavia and bib lettuce, the first strawberries, apples left over from the fall, but still juicy and good. And turnips. I studied them warily. It’s the farmer—and his stand disappeared, its absence taking me by surprise, before I got to ask his name—who convinced me to give them a try.

The turnips were arranged in bunches, each topped with greens. They were not like the kind I was used to seeing at the supermarket. In shape, each one looked a bit like a flattened ball. As for color, these plump little turnips were magnificent: pearly translucent white topped with a lilac blush. Of course, I bought a bunch.

The first time, I included the turnips in a vegetable soup, adding the greens, which gave a nutty flavor. I also put in onions, carrots, celery, a fennel ball, a few leaves of spinach (I make my soups with what vegetables I have on hand). After letting the vegetables simmer, I pureed them. The final product was fresh, light, and full of springtime flavor.

Next time I visited the maraîcher, I bought another bunch and followed his instructions: eat them raw. Now, I’ve got into the habit of using them in salads. After slicing the turnips paper thin, I toss them with a simple dressing of chopped garlic, olive oil, cider vinegar, a few grinds of pepper, and some salt. Then I cover them, pop them into the fridge to marinate, and the next day they are crisp and delicious. I also add them cooked to a vegetable medley with fresh peas and carrots.

In France as in many other parts of the world, turnips get a bad rap. The ancient Romans tossed them at unpopular politicians. In Europe, for centuries, the turnip was reserved for cows, pigs, sheep, and the poorest of the poor. Only in times of famine did people from all walks of life throw one into the pot. In the 19^th century world of the novels of Charles Dickens, a “turnip” was a bumbling idiot. During World War I, the Germans ate them because they had to. During World War II, it was the Brits’ turn to eat “Woolton pie,” a turnip dish named after Lord Woolton, the wartime Minister of Food, in charge of rationing. For the French, “un navet,” a turnip, is a film that is a flop.  

Without the covid-19 pandemic, I might have encountered the humble turnip in happier circumstances. Yet, our meeting has certainly been happy and fruitful, and now we are together for life. Tastes change, mine have. Today, I’d take a humble turnip over a potato any time.   

Sweet Consolations

 

For the living, death affects us most when we lose the ones we love. It is not easy to mourn those we have never known. In mid-April, France reached the sad milestone of 100,000 deaths from covid-19. In the face of this reality, can a nation come together to mourn and remember its dead?

Last month, I announced a series of articles about food and now I appear to be backsliding, returning to “that subject” again, yet food and mourning are inseparable. During my childhood in Pottsville, when there was a death in the neighborhood, we showed up at the family’s door with food, a casserole, a homemade pie, a cake, prepared with loving care, watered perhaps with tears, speaking a language more gentle, more profound, than anything we could put into words.

As an adult in France, I have tried to keep this practice alive. I’m someone who loves words, and I pride myself on using language with precision, yet when it comes to death, I still believe there’s nothing like food for the living.

For more than a year, communities around the world have been confronting the covid pandemic with the tools, material, psychological and spiritual, at their disposal. Now we must confront more than 3 million deaths. In the United States, the faces of those who have died from covid, with tributes to their lives, have been made available to a wide public on news sites and in other media. Smiling faces, young, old, and in-between, remind us that no two lives are alike.

France has followed a different route and it has not been good for the country. The covid-19 pandemic has been reduced to an affair of statistics, announced daily on the national news and on government and other on-line sites. How many dead, how many newly infected, how many in intensive care, with the capacity of IC units expressed in terms of percentages.

National goals are also presented in numbers and statistics: bring down the number of beds occupied in IC, reduce the number of new contaminations, roll out a larger number of vaccines. The number of new deaths is also tallied daily, but we rarely see the faces of those who have died unless they belong to the famous.

This month marked the one-year anniversary of a covid death, that of Christophe, a beloved French popstar. His face turned up again in the news, other celebrities remembered him, and his songs were played on radio and TV. This is an exception. Most covid deaths in France remain unsung.

French friends will argue that the French are a people who do not want their private lives displayed in public. They’ll suggest that Americans may carry things too far, publishing daily the faces and stories of ordinary people who have died of covid. Yet the French way makes me sad.

That’s why I seek consolation where I can. First of all, at a time when the French are letting down their guard even as the number of cases continues to rise, I find consolation in continuing to protect myself. I wear a mask, as required, when I leave my home. I try my best to keep a safe distance in stores, not always easy in a city like Paris. I keep in close touch with friends, enjoying outdoor walks and phone calls. I cultivate patience because the pandemic’s end is nowhere in sight.

And I try to make the most of life’s small pleasures, seeking sweet consolation where it can be found: in one of the oldest and best pastry shops in Paris, Vieille France, “Old France Pastry Shop,” a mere 10-minute walk from my home! For chasing away sadness and celebrating life, there’s nothing like some excellent pastry shared with a friend.

As for Vieille France, I have been seeking its sweet consolations for nearly 20 years. Founded in 1837, this pastry shop has been in the hands of the same family for generations and Olivier Hermabessière, pastry chef and co-owner of the shop with his wife Sylvie, uses the recipes of his grandfather to create classic French pastries such as the Saint-Honoré, named after the patron saint of bakers and a very chic street in Paris. The cake is made with choux pastry, light little “cabbage-balls” that can be filled with cream and then topped with medallions of caramelized sugar. Making a good Saint-Honoré requires the culinary skill that has gone into making French cuisine part of UNESCO’s cultural heritage of humanity.

At Vieille France, the Saint-Honoré is always good, as are other classics such as a chocolate or coffee éclair and what Americans call a “Napoleon;” the French, a “mille-feuille.” It got its French name because of its puff pastry so thin, so light, that 1,000 layers (mille-feuille) form one light, crispy and delicious biscuit. Take two biscuits, add a thick layer of delicate vanilla custard and voilà, you have a mille-feuille. Vieille France has one of the best in Paris. 

I also like to go to Vieille France so I can be served by Sylvie Hermabessière, who makes every customer feel welcome. Though for a few years I deserted her shop for the French countryside, I feel she remembers me.

Yesterday, I shared my cakes with Thierry, my downstairs neighbor and friend. He’s an optimist, glad to be alive and able to find good in each day. Outside, he wears his mask and rather than travel by metro, rides his bike from one end of Paris to the other to go to work. For our late-afternoon snack, I deliberately offered him the classics from Vieille France, the Saint-Honoré and the mille-feuille. I prefer chocolate pastries; Thierry prefers fruit chiffons. Upon finishing our cakes, we both agreed that though these were not our personal favorites, we were entirely satisfied.

As of this date, the French, still in partial lockdown, under a 7 PM curfew, are biting at the bit to get back outside, back to the terraces of cafés, back to their gym and to the movies, back to discotheques where they can dance the night away. They want life to return to the way it used to be, but that way may be gone forever.

Now is the time to be glad to be alive and for all of us who can, to think of all the sweet consolations that accompany us each day, and few things are better than delicious pastries shared with friends.