What vegetable could be more difficult to deal with than the artichoke? Who figured out that you could eat this thing? It’s armored like a scaly dinosaur and it has those vicious little thorns on its tough outer leaves that’ll prick you and make you bleed. Clearly – this vegetable doesn’t want to be eaten. When an artichoke is left alone in the ground — it’ll bloom into a deep violet blue because it’s actually a large flower bud – a type of thistle. And the ‘choke’ part inside is really a bunch of little flowerets just waiting to blossom. But I’ve never seen an artichoke get to that point. The ones that I’ve had — have ended up as a big, messy pile of greasy bruised leaves with teeth marks, and that spiky-strangle-ly choke is spread out on my plate like a bad science experiment, and I’m all the fatter and happier for it — burping up its curiously-flavored, tender heart.
If you do anything besides steam the life out of an artichoke and dip its edible parts into melted butter — and you cut into a raw one — it immediately needs to be rubbed with half a lemon so it won’t discolor and turn brown. And you’ve got to deal with choke because one of those little fuzzy things will – well – choke you. As you scoop them out and widen the base – you should keep following every scrape and paring cut you make with the lemon. Once the artichokes are trimmed up and soaking in a pot of – you guessed it — lemon water – then you can finally catch your breath – and make a plan. You’ve got some choices. You can braise these bottoms in olive oil and white wine – with tarragon and thyme and use them in salads, pasta or as a side to fish or chicken. Or you can slice them thinly and sauté them with onion, garlic and add spinach for a risotto.
Anything you eat or drink right after taking a bite of an artichoke will taste sweet because there’s a chemical called cynarin in the vegetable that inhibits our taste buds. That’s why the artichoke is considered one of most difficult foods to pair wine with. But I don’t worry about that – I figure that any of the cheap whites that I drink – can only taste better when their flavors — high notes, low notes and everything in between — have been distorted by cynarin.
When I was pregnant with my first child and living in California — I ate four or five artichokes a day. It was the only thing I craved — besides frozen cheese pizza. My husband even took me on a road trip to Castroville, The Artichoke Capital of the World. The town holds a festival every year in honor of its county’s official vegetable. There’s a picture somewhere in one of our many shoeboxes of family photos — of me – 6 months big with baby – hugging a statue of an artichoke the size of a garage. This makes me think that that first indomitable, kind of crazy-obsessed person, who figured out how to eat an artichoke — must have been really hungry. And she
definitely had to have been pregnant.
PS: Norma Jean (who later became Marilyn Monroe) was the first Artichoke Queen, crowned in 1947 at the Artichoke Festival in Castroville, California.
