This made my day!

Wild and out of control parsnips does describe what happens to gardens, yards, or any sunny, disturbed area here  (New England) when abandoned….

For this heimish soup, the humbler the ingredients and methods of preparation, the better. Mirepoix and herbs de provenance are lovely, but I’m talking about the kind of soup where the starring role are things like “petrushka,” as my Bubbie used to say. That’s Yiddish (or is it Hungarian?) for parsnip.

Which then reminds me of a wonderful unique Yiddish expression: hefker petrushka, meaning chaos, or as would be translated into modern Hebrew, balagan. It’s a pretty unbeatable expression — perhaps parsnips grew wildly in Europe and so the Yiddish saying for a wild, out-of-control situation developed from out of a patch of disorganized, overgrown parsnips?

https://www.ijn.com/jewish-penicillin/