What is "Grassicher"? or what could it have been a muddling of?

Question

In William Tarrant's 1862 Ningpo to Shanghai, he displays a highly Victorian aversion to calling rape (the plant) by its actual name. Instead of just using Latin, though, he opts for the bizarre coinage "Grassicher".

As far as Wiktionary knows, that word doesn't exist or is a misformed compound of 'grass' and 'safe'. Similarly, Google just seems to bring up a lot of discussions of the Polizei seizing marijuana in drug busts. Google Books mostly seems to break the two component words across sentences.

Does anyone know what Germanic word Tarrant was trying to say when he called rapeseed "Grassicher"?

Answer 1

I highly suspect that Tarrant was not basing his word coinage on any German or Germanic term and did not intend any reference to the German word sicher. In fact, I would assume he intended the word to rhyme with richer, not with sicker – or, if he intended a long /i/ sound as in why, corresponding words; I cannot find a correspondence to richer off the top of my head but take hiker for sicker. (Wisher might be closer to the German pronunciation of sicher but not all English speakers know this finer point of German phonology.)

All of Tarrant’s known biography places him in British Hong Kong or adjacent China. While there was a German colony (‘concession’) in Hankou (present-day Wuhan), most other German possessions in East Asia were closer to Beijing and thus far away from the central or southern Chinese area that Tarrant is known to have been in. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t have information on his early life before he arrived in Hong Kong in 1837 – it also doesn’t even give an approximate birth date.

For the record, the passage of the book can be found on Wikisource, where also the footnote can be accessed. Tarrant directly references Robert Fortune’s Wanderings (Three Years’ Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China). It is clear that the plant he has been referring to is termed Brassica chinensis by Fortune and Tarrant himself described it as a variant of B. napus (rapeseed). So obviously, using rapeseed or B. napus wouldn’t have been accurate to Tarrant because he considers it a different plant thus precluding the use of the common name.

One other potential option is that this was a misspelling introduced by some scribe or copy-editor. Maybe Tarrant dictated Brassica but for some unknown reason it was misheard and thus written down as grassica/grassicher at that exact one spot in the book. On the other hand, Tarrant may have jumbled around a couple of letters of brassica – a term he was clearly familiar with.

Unfortunately though, barring the discoveries of additional diary notes or the likes of Tarrant or a medium contacting his soul in the realm of the dead we have no way of finding out for sure.

Answer 2

I doubt that it is German word (or belongs to another Germanic language). If one reads "Grassicher", one could think that it is a compound of the German words "Gras" and "sicher", but that does not make much sense. However, if an English reader believes it is German, he would perhaps pronounce it like "Grassica".

In your source we can read

There is an other occurrence on p. 8:

This shows that "Beans Grassicher" or "Grassicher Beans" is the name of some plant. As you write in your question, Tarrant wants to avoid calling rape by its actual name. I therefore believe, as pointed out in comments and Jan's answer, that Tarrant misspelled the Latin word "Brassica". Whether he really wanted to describe "Brassica napus" (rape) or "Brassica rapa" or something else in this family, remains open. Howewer, in combination with "beans" it is most likely that he meant rape.

PS. A Google search for "Grassica" yields hits like this and that. This shows that the same misunderstanding still occurs. Moreover, searching for "Krassica" which sounds similar yields a few results like this. The (German) text contains "Brassica", obviously the OCR software did not identify it correctly.

Edited:

rastafile points out in a comment that Tarrant's book contains footnotes, in particular footnote (1) which gives an explanation of "Grassicher":

Tarrant refers to Robert Fortune's book "Three years wanderings in the northern provinces of China", see here. It seems that my theory that "Grassicher Beans" is a compound expression for a single plant is false. Probably it is just a missing comma between the two words. In Fortune's book one finds various listings of plants clearly showing this:

The cabbage oil plant is Brassica chinensis. It would be interesting to clarify whether the German translation of Fortune's book is the source of the strange word "Grassicher".

Edited:

The German translatiuon can be found here. It does not contain the word "Grassicher". See p. 46.