And then I spotted it.

Rutabaga.

Now what does that word conjure up for you?

Some tiny South Pacific atoll, perhaps, fringed with coconut trees under an azure sky?

Or a tiny, fly-blown West African country that no one's ever heard of?

More the atoll, for me, somewhere west of Tahiti but you won't find it in any atlas.

But you will find it between onions and carrots on the label – and inside – a jar of Branston pickle.

Rutabaga is one of those words which transport me over the hills and far away.

For example, whenever I drive down Chesterfield Road and see the sign for Porcelanosa I don't think of bathroom fittings, shiny taps and showers. Or toilets, bidets and basins.

For me Porcelanosa is a country in Central America, racked by revolution, led by a man in a big hat with a big cigar and brandishing a rifle.

How much more exciting than water closets.

It's the same with rutabaga. How can something so mysterious with a definite hint of the exotic be in something as mundane as a jar of pickle?

While I've been eating Branston for years I had no idea what this rutabaga was. But since a lot of it was going inside my tummy it seemed only sensible to find out.

It came as a bit of a let down to discover there is not even a hint of the exotic about rutabaga.

It's another name for swede.

Americans and Canadians use it and they borrowed it from the Swedes.

Somehow, eating Branston pickle, which as a nation we do a lot, wouldn't be quite the same if you looked at the list of contents and saw plain old boring common or garden swede.

If you Google rutabaga you come across the web site of the Advanced Rutabagan Studies Institute in Oregon in the United States.

It gives details of the tenth world rutabaga curling championships and there's a natty little video of a caterpillar eating rutabaga leaves.

At this point I realised it was a spoof and that Americans can do funny.

Although they do have a Rutabaga Queen contest in Humboldt County, California, and that looks genuine.

You might be suprrised to know that the rutabaga was carved out into weird faces to hold candles at Hallowe'en until we discovered pumpkins in this country. They were a lot easier to carve.

And of course the vegetable was made famous by Frank Zappa in his song Call Any Vegetable.

It got a whole verse to itself but Frank didn't exactly push himself writing the lyrics. "Rutabaga, Rutabaga, Rutabaga, Rutabaga, Rutabayyy . . ."

See what I mean?

But one mystery remains. Why does something as resolutely British as Branston Pickle contain among its 23 ingredients one which uses the American term for the very humble swede?

Branston Pickle first appeared in 1922, based on a recipe by a Mrs Caroline Graham who lived in the Branston area of Burton on Trent.

Cross & Blackwell started making it – and decided on the term rutabaga rather than swede – and it caught on in a big way.