My maternal grandmother survived Auschwitz, moved to New York, and worked as a cook at a Jewish senior center in Queens. She was known for elaborate, multi-course holiday feasts. She pulled handmade noodles and fermented her own blueberry wine. These were the foods she prepared in Poland before she was sent to the camps, before she was starved on a diet that consisted mainly of watery turnip soup.
My grandmother Rose. Date unknown. Photo provided by author.
My grandmother passed away when I was six, but I grew up around my family’s reminiscing. They talked about her apple cakes, schnitzel, and almond cookies. I suspect the richness and excess of the meals she cooked in America were a response to her experience of starvation. For my family, boiled turnips became a reminder of my grandmother’s suffering. We know from Proust that taste and smell are strong tools of evoking nostalgia, but they are just as likely to return us to unpleasant or traumatic memories.1
I was young when I first learned about the turnip soup. I’ve always shown a keen—sometimes even inappropriately keen—interest in food. When I learned about Auschwitz, I wanted to know what the prisoners ate. My mother told me that my grandmother had said they ate the water that was used to boil turnips. One could hardly call it “soup.” Decades later, she could not stand the smell of boiled turnips, which made her nauseous. The Holocaust survivor and writer Yehiel De-Nur, also known by his pen name Ka-Tsetnik, corroborates her memory of the turnip soup. In Ka-Tsetnik’s books, prisoners steal or fight over turnip peels.2
Turnips remain unpopular, even hated in the United States.3 But these days, in major American cities, farmers’ market stands carry varieties of turnips. Laid out under white tents, next to jars of local honey and preserves, attached to their long, green, leafy stems, they are innocently beautiful. I’ve heard chefs describe turnips as woody, sweet, and peppery. But I can never look at the vegetable without thinking of the camps. When boiled, their earthiness remains distinct, foreign, and haunting. The idea of boiling turnips in my own home still creeps me out.
“The Interior of a Kitchen with an Old Woman Peeling Turnips,” David Teniers the Younger, Public domain, via (Wikimedia Commons)
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Sometimes I worry that the bodily memory of my family’s inherited trauma will end with my generation. I grew up knowing that my grandmother’s camp uniform was somewhere in my aunt’s apartment. As a child, lying on the floor at night after holiday meals, I’d wonder where it was. I could never fall asleep knowing that it might be close. I was fixated on the potential material vestiges of Holocaust history. At school, a teacher once told me all the water in the world is recycled. Running the faucet at night, I’d worry that some altered molecular form of the water that once ran through faucets in the camp or filled the pots for “soup” might be the stuff I washed my face with at home in New York.
If a small, mundane item such as a boiled turnip ceases to connote a dark history, will we forget what happened? Food magazines tell us turnips are delicious when roasted with miso butter. There is a difference between healing and forgetting. Still I cleave to this particular manifestation of inherited trauma: the fear of turnips, because I want to maintain a visceral, material connection to the past.
Photo of author’s grandmother. Date unknown. Photo provided by author.
Recipe 1: Turnip Surówka
(more Old World, popular in Eastern Europe)
While my grandmother did not cook turnips, she served them raw as a salad alongside broiled red meat or schnitzel. She would peel one, grate it and season with a small pinch of salt and a teaspoon of neutral oil. A little salt goes a long way.
Recipe 2: Poached Turnips in Tarragon Beurre Blanc
(trendy, popular in France)
Peel and slice your turnips into wedges. Then make the Beurre Blanc:
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup sherry vinegar
2 tablespoons finely chopped shallot
1/8 teaspoon white pepper, or to taste
2 sticks (1 cup) unsalted butter, cut into cubes and chilled
Combine shallots, tarragon, and pepper in a small saucepan and add white wine and vinegar to cover ingredients. Bring to a simmer and cook until the liquid has mostly evaporated and only a couple of tablespoons of vinegar remain. Slowly whisk in butter one piece at a time until fully incorporated.
Add turnip wedges to your emulsion, cover, and simmer over a low heat until they are tender but still have some bite (about 20 minutes). The turnips should release a flavorful liquid that will prevent the sauce from reducing too much.
- Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume 1 – Swann’s Way & Within a Budding Grove (New York: Vintage, 1982), 48-51.
- Ka-Tsetnik, Atrocity: A Story of Auschwitz (Fort Lee, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1962), 183-201.
- SWNS, “These Are America’s Favorite Vegetables – and Most Hated,” New York Post, July 17, 2019.
