Rutabaga be augmented with black pepper. Onions are never used. Regionally, neeps are a common ingredient in soups and stews. In England, swede is boiled together with carrots and served either mashed or pureed with butter and ground pepper. The flavored cooking water is often retained for soup, or as an addition to gravy. Swede is an essential vegetable component of the traditional Welsh lamb broth called cawl and Irish stew as eaten in England. Swede is also a component of the popular condiment Branston Pickle. The swede is also one of the four traditional ingredients of the pasty originating in
Stew are recipes for lamb stews and fish stews in the Roman cookery book "Apicius", believed to date from the 4th century AD. "Le Viandier", one of the oldest cookbooks in French, written in the early 14th century by the French chef known as Taillevent, has ragouts or stews of various types in it. The first written reference to 'Irish stew' is in Byron's "The Devil's Drive" (1814): "The Devil ... dined on ... a rebel or so in an Irish stew." In meat-based stews, white stews, also known as "blanquettes" or "fricassées", are made with lamb or veal that is