This turnip is a single internal contradiction.

She's a bitch, but a surprisingly undemanding one.

It demands an outrageous amount of attention and then grows again in the greatest frugality.

It survives the harshest of winters, only to wither on the seventh day after harvest.

She is a princess on the Brandenburg pea and yet has to lead a life as Cinderella.

It was the favorite turnip of Prussian kings and poet princes and at the same time saved generations of beggars from starvation.

It ought to shine in the brightest light of gourmet cuisine on the plates of the best restaurants, and instead it is threatened with extinction.

All this is the Teltower Rübchen, and all this makes the small tuber one of the most idiosyncratic foods in Germany.

Jakob Strobel and Serra

deputy head of the feature section.

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Turnips are only allowed to grow in the area of ​​the horseshoe-shaped terminal moraine between Berlin-Zehlendorf, Teltow and Luckenwalde, because only here is there the special mixture of sand and clay that gives it its unique aroma.

And only two farmers bother to grow the capricious tubers.

One of them is Ronny Schäreke, who is the fourth generation to devote himself to turnips and whose work in the fields is more reminiscent of the day-to-day work of a farmer two hundred years ago than of today's industrialized agriculture.

The tiny seeds, hardly bigger than coriander, Schärke has to put into the ground either by hand or with an outrageously expensive single-grain machine and then cover them with nets, otherwise the cabbage fly deposits its maggots in the fruit.

After that, however, he can leave the beets to their own devices without fertilization or watering.

With every day in the fresh air, the tuber drastically loses its aroma

But during the harvest between October and February, things become atavistic again: like in a painting by Pieter Brueghel, Schärke crawls under the nets across his field and uses a spatula to remove each individual tuber from the earth.

He has to hunch over his shoulder for an agonizingly long time before he has a significant amount together, and he can't even harvest from stock because the tubers drastically lose their aroma every day in the fresh air.

Schärke only harvests them to order and sells them for eleven euros per kilo directly from the farm, to handpicked restaurateurs from the area or to customers all over Germany by express delivery.

If he wanted to calculate economically, he would probably have to charge forty euros per kilo, an illusory price for a tuber that for centuries was a poor man's food.

Long before the potato revolutionized the diet of Prussia's farmers and soldiers, turnips made sure that people on the Brandenburg sands didn't starve.

But the leading gourmets of their time also valued the uniqueness of the tubers, which were exported as far away as Moscow and Lisbon.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Teltower pastor Johann Christian Jeckel praised it as a gift from God, which "is graced with a sweet and healthy taste before the benevolent Creator".