Christmas Roots: Advent #9
Welcome to the ninth of my Advent newsletters, a paean to the humble swede.
When you imagine what a poet might choose as muse or subject, a swede doesn’t easily spring to mind. Yet when I sat down to eulogise the swede as my favourite festive root, I was most surprised and pleased to find that more illustrious writers and poets had got there well before me. Verse after verse about clotted mud, strafing winds, chapped legs, and tight, tense backs remind us of the conditions endured then—and now—by the people who grow and harvest our food. Having worked school winter holidays as a potato picker in farms perched upon the high ridges of the South Suffolk Stour valley, I can attest to how tough these jobs are.
In We Field Women by Thomas Hardy, set in Flintcomb-Ash, the farm in Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, we are not shielded from the back-breaking effort that hard manual labour involves. The poem is narrated by one of the field women who spend each autumn trimming swedes in the rain, cutting off the knobs on the swedes to make them easier to slice up for cattle food. The fact that the job ceased when the swedes became too cold to cut up says much about the bone-numbing, frigid conditions they endured, causing their hands to become red-raw and cracked from the swede juice as it leaked around the handle of their clasp knives:
“How it rained
When we worked at Flintcomb-Ash,
And could not stand upon the hill
Trimming swedes for the slicing mill.
swedes – root vegetables The wet washed through us – plash, plash, plash:
How it rained! How it snowed
When we crossed from Flintcomb-Ash
To the Great Barn for drawing reed,
pulling out long straw for thatching roofs Since we could nowise chop a swede. –
nowise – not at all (because the swedes were frozen) Flakes in each doorway and casement-sash:
How it snowed!”
Our dispositions might not be sweetened after a day in a freezing cold field, but the frost and snow certainly have a sweetening effect upon many root vegetables turning the flesh of the swede a sweeter, darker hue. Cold weather triggers the breakdown of the starch in its swollen globular shaped root, releasing glucose. Sugar freezes at a lower temperature than water and becomes a super useful vegetal anti-freeze preventing the damage that frozen water causes in more tender plants. Come the deepest winter, any swedes left in fields are said to be the food of choice for discerning hares and rabbits- a gnaw-able energy ball if you like- and finding them becomes easy when the freeze-thaw cycle pushes the green, bronze and purple shoulders of the roots upwards until they become a lumpy patchwork on the field surface, crowned with their floppy green leaves.
Charmingly for poet Edward Thomas, the sight of a well-stored earth clamp of swedes arranged in layers and enclosed in straw and soil is akin to the opening of a Pharoah’s tomb, the roots kept sweet and dry from the ‘moans and drips of winter’. For hungry people cooking their way through the hunger gap, they are as precious as the jewels and treasures of an Egyptian King and were seemingly stored with similar care:
“They have taken the gable from the roof of clay
On the long swede pile. They have let in the sun
To the white and gold and purple of curled fronds
Unsunned. It is a sight more tender-gorgeous
At the wood-corner where Winter moans and drips
Than when, in the Valley of the Tombs of Kings,
A boy crawls down into a Pharaoh’s tomb
And, first of Christian men, beholds the mummy,
God and monkey, chariot and throne and vase,
Blue pottery, alabaster, and gold.”
We always eat swede at Christmas. Its simple, country rootstock is transmogrified when mashed with carrots, roasted and enriched with maple syrup, smoked salt and Jamaican long-pepper. Turned deep-marigold from the heat of the oven with a chewy, smoky-sweet crust from maple syrup and smoothly fleshed underneath, it is perfect with roasts, accompanying stews and braises, and as a bed for a pile of barbecued pork ribs or chicken thighs. The addition of long-pepper adds complex notes of liquorice, tobacco and cardamom. Its effects are cool in the mouth, as opposed to warm. Although the Kama Sutra praises its aphrodisiac qualities stating that long-pepper should be mixed with black pepper, other spices, and honey and applied to genitalia, I don’t recommend you do this. Health care systems are a bit busy at the moment and won’t welcome you and your long pepper-induced urethritis. If you are feeling amorous, it might be safer to channel Nicholas Nickleby’s widowed mother’s neighbour who tries to win her affection by chucking vegetables over the fence: ‘The air was darkened by a shower of onions, turnip-radishes, and other small vegetables, which fell rolling and scattering, and bumping about, in all directions.’ Mrs Nickelby was charmed.
‘Three that are one since time began,
Horse, cart and man,
Lurch down the lane patched with loose stones;
Swedes in the cart heaped smooth and round
Like skulls that from the ground
The man has dug without the bones
Leave me in doubt
Whether the swedes with gold shoots sprout
Or with fresh fancies bursts each old bald sconce.
Andrew Young, Collected Poems (Rupert Hart-Davis 1960).
Jane Kramer on the hidden allure of root vegetables via the New Yorker.
Doug Bierend interviews Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black.
Where is the water going? In The Counter.
Sourced Journeys focuses on stories about global food and drink systems and how they interlace.
More on Hardy’s ‘We Field Women’ here.
‘Light nurtures beauty –
what is a potato to a cauliflower, or a lettuce to a turnip?
But darkness also has its arc. Notice the curves on a potato.
Those are the remainders of lost journeys, spent looking for light.
Hence the potato’s blind eyes. The bones of darkness have punctured them.’