Ruminations

mangel-wurzel [mang-guhl-wur-zuhl]

noun:
(chiefly British) a variety of the beet Beta vulgaris, cultivated as food for livestock.

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The village's Punkie Night takes place on the last Thursday in October. Children carry "punkies" - lanterns traditionally made from a large turnip known as a mangel-wurzel - and stop at key locations to sing the Punkie Song. (Linda Serck, Halloween: England's strange and ancient winter rituals, BBC, October 2014)

Teams of three compete to see who can land their mangel-wurzel nearest a large, leafless one, called a 'Norman'. (So wurzel our mangels gone?, Express, October, 2012)

We feel inclined to embrace Mr Hardy, though we are not fond of him, in pure satisfaction with the good brown soil and substantial flesh and blood, the cows, and the mangel-wurzel, and the hard labour of the fields - which he makes us smell and see. (Joanne Wilkes (ed), Literary and Cultural Criticism from the Nineteenth Century)

He soon discovers that the melon has no more flavor than a mangel-wurzel, and that the apricot tastes like a turnip radish. (Charles James Lever, The Dodd Family Abroad)

She turned to Philip. "Athelny's always like this when we come down here. Country, I like that! Why, he don't know a swede from a mangel-wurzel." (Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage)

His mouth is open, too, and big enough apparently to hold a mangel-wurzel. ( Gordon Stables, The Cruise of the Land-Yacht 'Wanderer'; or, Thirteen Hundred Miles in my Caravan)

Origin:

Root vegetables aren't the most sexy things either to eat or write about but I hope to show that this one's an exception. Let's get a couple of important things right before we go any further - 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.

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. (World Wide Words)