In the area where I live, swedes are called mangol wurzels (or mangols). No idea of the etymology. (Nutrax? Vinny?) Anyway, the name Wurzel or Worzel indicates a bumpkin. There's a band called The Wurzels. They do comic songs and had several hits in the 70's.
Turnip head is an insult, applied to an England football manager. An insult to turnips.
In Scotland they are known as "neeps" and mashed ones my mother's family used to call "bashed neeps". In line with the Anglo Saxon, I see.
Locally they are left in the fields for animals to eat.
10
cogito
11
anonymous
<blockquote>Quote
<hr>Locally they are left in the fields for animals to eat. <hr></blockquote>
I thought they were left in the soil to get frosted and sweeten, like parsnips.
12
cogito
they turn them up roughly with a plough and leave them for the cattle, arbon. Later in the winter, when pasture is less available.
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nutraxfornerves
I can't vouch for local useage, of course, but as far as I know, mangle wurzel is a beet, not a turnip or rutabaga/swede. Beets are ot botanically related to turnips & rutabagas. <blockquote>Quote
<hr>The mangold-wurzel (or mangel-wurzel) is a member of the family Chenopodiaceae, genus Beta (beets). The beets include the sugar beet (Beta vulgaris altissima), beetroot (Beta vulgaris craca), and Swiss chard (Beta vulgaris flavascens). The mangold-wurzel (Beta vulgaris vulgaris) is a subspecies of the common beet (Beta vulgaris), as are chard (or leaf beet or spinach beet) (Beta vulgaris cicla), and sea beet (Beta vulgaris maritima).
Developed in the 18th century for cattle fodder, probably derived from sea beet which is indigenous to southern and western Europe. Identified by its large white or yellow swollen roots. The name comes from the German for beet (mangel) and root (wurzel). <hr></blockquote>And<blockquote>Quote
<hr>its name is usually written mangel-wurzel and it isn’t a relative of the turnip but a large variety of beet, closely related to the sugar beet and the beetroot or red beet.
Mind you, many people have been confused about it down the years. These root vegetables all look alike to the non-specialist and we don’t even all have the same names for them. The British swede is the rutabaga in the US, for example, the latter name having been taken from an old dialect Swedish word for this type of turnip. (Brits call it a swede because it was bred in Sweden in the eighteenth century; the Scots name for it is neep, as in bashed neeps, or mashed turnips, a traditional accompaniment to the famous haggis). But when H L Mencken wrote in The American Language in 1921 that Englishmen “still call the rutabaga a mangelwurzel”, he was seriously up the botanical and agricultural creek without a leg to stand on.
[snip]
Mangel-wurzel is mainly a British term, which is often shortened to mangel, or sometimes to mangold. To many townies, it evokes a stereotyped traditional yokel rurality in which every peasant wears a smock, wields a pitchfork, and talks in a Mummerset accent. Think of the scarecrow Worzel Gummidge, whose first name comes from the vegetable, though the author states that his head was actually made from a turnip. Confusion abounds.
Mangel-wurzel is originally German. The first part is the old word Mangold, meaning beet or chard (the latter being the green leaves from a variety of beet). The second part is Wurzel, a root. Germans became confused about the first part several centuries ago and thought it was instead Mangel, a shortage or lack. From this has grown up the popular belief that mangel-wurzel refers to a famine food, a root you eat only when you’re starving. This is a gross calumny, since when young it’s as tasty and sweet as other sorts of beet, though it’s mainly used as animal fodder.<hr></blockquote>
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vinnyd
Nutras has said pretty much everything worth saying, but nevertheless I'm going to point out that the Chenopodiaceae (beets, chard, mangelwurzel) are the goosefoot family. The Mexican herb epazote is also chenopdiacious. Not a word I get to use every day.
And I guess I could also add that the chenopodiacious chard is often called Swiss chard to distinguish from cardoons, sometimes called chard in the past, which are in the thistle family, like artichokes (but you eat the long stems).
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