KEENE -- It was a solid, smashed rutabaga hit.

In food, in story and even in a rutabaga ballad, the lowly root crop turned out to be a worthy cause for celebration.

The first-ever Great Adirondack Rutabaga Festival drew a large crowd Sunday, with scores of the curious and hungry piling on to Marcy Field for a rutabaga bite or two.

Mashed and baked with cranberries, grated with chives into cheesecake, pureed into creamy soup and spiced in frosted sweet cakes -- no matter how they cooked it -- the day was the root crop's redemption.

Lily Frechette, 2, strolled under a red striped tent in a pale-green cotton dress clutching two very large rutabaga plants about her height.

She just tugged them from the community garden ground.

The smallest one earned the tot a first place for perfect-shaped rutabaga.

Her brother, Cedar, 6, won a prize for the most distinctive rutabaga.

And Larry Jaques, a gardener and all-around Keene cook and pot washer, took first place for the biggest rutabaga, a specimen about the size of a honeydew melon.

Some people gawked at it.

They had never seen a rutabaga grown so big.

Some people had never even seen a rutabaga at all.

"In fact, we were just trying to figure out what a rutabaga is," said Carol Young.

Jaques said there was no secret method for growing big rutabagas.

"I just put a seed in the ground and put the water to it."