IN PRAISE OF RUTABAGAS:

Yes, rutabagas are a kind of turnip, and turnips tend to be unappealingly bitter. But rutabagas (which are yellow, not white) are usually sweeter, especially if you roast them. And if you enhance their natural sweetness with some kind of glaze, they taste better still. They have a strong flavor, for sure, but one that grows on you.

When I came to the USA twenty years ago, I'd never heard of rutabagas, but I'd grown up (in the north of England) knowing that I preferred what we called "swede" to the detested turnip. I didn't exactly like swede a whole lot, but I suspect my parents didn't either, and we only ever ate it mashed to a pulp together with equally overcooked boiled carrots and doused in ounces of butter and a lot of salt and pepper. (Why did we eat them at all? One day I'll write something about what an English greengrocer's shop looked like in winter in the 1960s -- with maybe 9 or 10 items, tops -- and why you therefore ended up eating even things you didn't really care for that much -- just for a change).

Anyway, it turns out the word rutabaga derives from a Swedish dialect word "rotabagge" (literally, bag root), and is in fact the same as what we called swede, namely brassica napus. I bought some very fresh looking rutabagas today (before I learned all this) in the impressive, newly opened New Seasons market on Division St. here in Portland and turned to Andrea Chesman's "The Roasted Vegetable" (Harvard Common Press, 2002), which I've had out of the library for months in anticipation of fall but never consulted until today, to figure out what to do with them.

Her recipe for Maple-Glazed Rutabagas (p. 50) involves tossing 1-inch square chunks of peeled rutabaga in oil and salt and roasting them in a shallow baking pan for around 25 minutes at 450 degrees until they're tender, then pouring a maple syrup/butter/nutmeg mixture over them and putting them back in the oven for another 10 minutes or so to finish cooking. I had to turn the oven down to 400 to avoid the chunks turning too brown before they were fully cooked, and I omitted the butter from the glaze (there was enough fat with the oil I'd started out with (she suggests canola oil, but I used peanut oil, which worked fine and added a little flavor of its own), but otherwise followed her simple but effective recipe, and served them with mashed potatoes and Morningstar brand fajita patties. The glaze helped them develop a toothsome lightly carbonized crust, and they disappeared pretty fast.