It's easy to root for root vegetables.
They are the underdogs of the culinary world, the downtrodden and forgotten in a world of shining stars. They will never be fashionable, never hip. They will not achieve the fleeting popularity of quinoa, farro, pork bellies or even kale.
They are, and will always be, just root vegetables.
They do not know the joy of growing in the sunshine; they burrow instead into the dirt. They can be a little hard to cook and a little hard to eat. And if truth be told, they tend to be kind of ugly.
And yet they taste so, so good.
My favorite root vegetable is probably the homeliest of the lot. Celeriac is the root of a plant in the celery family; it is often called celery root. It tastes like celery, too, only a milder version and smoother. It's sort of like Celery Lite.
Which happens to make it perfect for Cream of Celeriac Soup. Celery is a little too assertive for soup, though plenty of people use it, but celeriac makes a soup that sparkles with sophistication.
The secret is to begin with a cream base. The secret to many things is to begin with a cream base. Frankly, if you began with a cream base, you could make gravel taste good.
To make a cream base, saute onions and shallots in oil; then add white wine and then stock, and reduce each one until it is nearly dry. Once those flavors have concentrated, only then do you add the cream. And it is magnificent.
To make the soup, just simmer celeriac in the cream base and a little more stock until it is tender. Then puree.
For my next root vegetable, I chose parsnips _ because I can use them to make parsnip chips. Actually, you can use many root vegetables to make chips (after all, potatoes are also root vegetables), but I like parsnips because of their inherent sweetness.
It's not an overpowering sweetness, it's just enough to be a foil to the root's earthiness.
Parsnips are also easy to slice thin, which helps to make delicately crispy chips. You can use a mandoline if you have one, but if you don't you can find just as much success with an ordinary vegetable peeler.
Parsnip chips are simple to make and delicious, but perhaps their greatest benefit comes when you serve them to others. Your guests will look at you in amazement and say, "What are these? They're wonderful."
"Oh," you can say. "Just some root vegetable."
Turnips are usually thought of as that thing you forget to add to soups, but they have many wonderful uses of their own. I used them to make a main course, Braised Turnips With Thyme.
This is a hearty dish, a vegetable stew with a spectacular twist. You simmer together turnips, rutabagas, onion, garlic and a carrot, plus thyme for flavor, salt for seasoning and a bit of flour to thicken the sauce.
So far, so good. A bit of parsley, a bit of pepper and you have a typical vegetable ragout _ or at least typical for a ragout that uses root vegetables as its primary ingredients.
And then there's that twist: You add Dijon mustard and cream. Not much of either, but just enough to change the flavor completely and lift the dish into the stratosphere.
Finally, I made a Rutabaga Puree With Leeks, which at its heart is an improvement on mashed potatoes. It's mashed potatoes with a lot more flavor.
You actually begin with a potato. But then you add rutabagas, with their intriguingly earthy taste, and leeks, with a subtle dose of onion. A single clove of garlic adds a hint of more flavor, and thyme contributes its fair share as well. Cream (or something less fattening) and butter finish the dish.
You may never look at a mashed potato again. When you're eating something as sublime as rutabaga puree, it's hard to believe that some people actually look down on root vegetables.
