Did anyone else carve a turnip instead of a pumpkin as a kid?

[FlyingMonkeys]

I can remember my mum always used to carve a turnip for Halloween. Was this a thing for other people too?

Yes, always a turnip. Well, once I think - we didn't do it again.

But as ever the south provail.
Clearly not on here, as the vast majority of posters call "swedes" "turnips".

East
Not confused at all.
In some places the yellow ones are called turnips, neeps or bagies (pronounced baygies) and white ones are called small/ white turnips.

You get different coloured/textured carrots or apples but they are still all carrots/apples.

Just cos you say they are swedes makes no difference to the rest of us at all. Which part of that dont you understand?

Yes! We were in the North of England. The spoon used to bend when you were hollowing the turnip out. We did bobbing for apples and made everything ourselves. When I first visited the US around Halloween I was shocked by how much orange and black crap you could buy for it and now it’s exactly the same here.

We only had neep lanterns when I was growing up in Scotland, we never saw pumpkins in the shops. Neeps look so much more sinister but they’re a bugger to carve!

Turnip lanterns where I grew up. Turnips, of course, being large, yellow-fleshed things!

We went guising, all dressed up, and may have had a Halloween party where dooking for apples and eating treacle scones suspended from strings was involved.

Most unhygienic.

I’d forgotten the treacle scones on strings!

I loved dooking for apples, there were two ways I remember- either you kneel on a chair above the container full of floating apples, hold a fork by the handle in your mouth and try to drop it down to hit an Apple, or you kneel on the floor next to the container, stick your whole face in and try to get one with your teeth.
Maybe the fork version was an attempt at hygiene?

There were no forks when I did itJessie; and lots of people used the same basin of water before it was changed (not envy).

A deeper delve into my memory reminds me that the dangling treacle scones may have had coins pushed into them as a "prize" if you managed to eat your way to them. So, that wasn't a further hygiene issue or choking hazard at all.

Its not 'dooking' if you use a fork😀
Noticed kids primary used a fork at haloween parties but many of the kids chose to 'dook' propely.

Yes, can still remember the smell of singed turnip when the candle went in, nowt like it

Fair point in that the wussy fork option avoids getting wet, so no actual “dooking” happens

The scones thing sounds great. We did similar but with apples - it was called snap apple. So what with that and duck apple, it was a pretty apple-y affair. Don't know how that would go over with today's DC mind you!

I can still remember the floating slavers in the bowl of water by the time we’d all had at least one turn

My partner says he used to carve a 'turnip' and at halloween but it turns out he meant a swede. They call swedes turnips up north apparently. Very confusing.

Yes! My parents didn't like anything to do with Halloween and my mum didn't want to waste food or spend a lot of money on a pumpkin. We call them swedes thou even though we're northern. Is that normal?

Oh I remember toffee apples on strings, strung from a washing line, to be eaten with your hands behind your back. Yum.

Sort of similar to bobbing for apples (basin of water, hands behind back) which dd and I tried recently - she was really keen - and you really do get a face full of water and not much apple to show for it. Better in memory than practice!

No, a buns dipped in treacle on a string! What a mess

Willow - yes of course I agree you can have different colours/textures of carrots and apples and they are still just carrots and apples but …. swedes and turnips are NOT the same vegetable.

Personally I don't mind at all what anybody calls the things they carve for Halloween, it's simply the lack of acknowledgement that swedes and turnips are completely different that I find a little bit odd

But they're not completely different. The turnip is is the father of the swede. (It's mum is a cabbage).

NI - scooping out the turnips must have kept us occupied for days! So many ruined spoons.

Am feeling nostalgic for the burning smell now! Don't think I saw an actual pumpkin in the shops until I was grown up.

I could be wrong, but Halloween didn't seem like as big a deal here as Guy Fawkes night was in England at that time. Just my perception from tv etc at the time. 70s/80s I mean.

Lottie - again, I agree the two root vegetables share some genetics (if that's the right word). However, they are not inter-changeable. The texture, colour and definitely the flavour, differs quite a bit.

Not many people buy the smaller white flesh turnips to eat as a stand-alone vegetable, whereas the harder orange flesh swede is far more common. I wonder if the swede and turnip carvers actually eat the leftover bits!

Oh yes! The hard work of hollowing it out and the smell of it when you put a candle in the tiny hole!

Bloody miss it!

Oh yes, we eat / ate them.

I know what you're saying (and have noticed turnips but not swedes being quite fashionable in recent years) but I think they sort of are regarded as interchangeable - or at least as closely enough related to be regarded as different versions of the same thing, rather than a different kind of thing.

Sort of like, not so very long ago in the UK, pink was not regarded as being a different colour from red. Colour distinctions vary across languages even now. What we regard as distinct is as much learnt as inherent.