The Artichoke

I cooked an artichoke last night and ate it this morning for brunch. Who do you think was the first person that decided an artichoke could be eaten? And how would they go about it? Who sucked the meat off the end of the leaves, then cut all of those hairs away and thought, the bottom part should taste good? I think about that every time I eat one. 

I always put a bay leaf and lots of peppercorns only because that is how my mom always did it. 

 

History and Legends of Artichokes 

Artichoke origins dates back to the time of the Greek philosopher and naturalist, Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.), who wrote of them being grown in Italy and Sicily. 

Pedanius Dioscorides (40-90 A.D.), a 1st century A.D. Greek physician of Anazarbus, Cilicia, wrote about artichokes at the time of Christ. While traveling as a surgeon with the Roman army of Emperor Nero, he collected information on the remedies of the period and wrote a work on The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides. Originally written in Greek, Dioscorides’ herbal was later translated into Latin as De Materia Medica. It remained the authority in medicinal plants for over 1500 years. 

Ancient Greeks and Romans considered artichokes a delicacy and an aphrodisiac. In Ancient Greece, the artichoke was attributed to being effective in securing the birth of boys. 

In 77 A.D., the Roman naturalist Caius Plinius Secundus, called Pliny the Elder (23–79 A.D.), called the choke “one of the earth’s monstrosities.” Evidently he and his colleagues continued to enjoy eating them. Wealthy Romans enjoyed artichokes prepared in honey and vinegar, seasoned with cumin, so that the treat would be available year round.

Beginning about 800 A.D., North African Moors begin cultivating artichokes in the area of Granada, Spain, and another Arab group, the Saracens, became identified with chokes in Sicily. This may explain why the English word artichoke is derived from the Arab, “al’qarshuf” rather than from the Latin, “cynara.” Between 800 and 1500, it’s probable that the artichoke was improved and transformed, perhaps in monastery gardens, into the plant we would recognize today.

Artichokes were first cultivated at Naples around the middle of the 15th century and gradually spread to other sections of Europe. After Rome fell, artichokes became scarce but re-emerged during the Renaissance in 1466 when the Strozzi family brought them from Florence to Naples. 

The artichoke is a domesticated variety of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus),[ which is native to the Mediterranean area. There was debate over whether the artichoke was a food among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or whether that cultivar was developed later, with Classical sources referring instead to the wild cardoon.The cardoon is mentioned as a garden plant in the eighth century BCE by Homer and Hesiod. Pliny the Elder mentioned growing of 'carduus' in Carthage and Cordoba. In North Africa, where it is still found in the wild state, the seeds of artichokes, probably cultivated, were found during the excavation of Roman-period Mons Claudianus in Egypt. Varieties of artichokes were cultivated in Sicily beginning in the classical period of the ancient Greeks; the Greeks calling them kaktos. In that period, the Greeks ate the leaves and flower heads, which cultivation had already improved from the wild form. The Romans called the vegetable carduus (hence the name cardoon). Further improvement in the cultivated form appears to have taken place in the medieval period in Muslim Spain and the Maghreb, although the evidence is inferential only. By the twelfth century, it was being mentioned in the compendious guide to farming composed by Ibn al-'Awwam in Seville (though it does not appear in earlier major Andalusian Arabic works on agriculture), and in Germany by Hildegard von Bingen.

Le Roy Ladurie, in his book Les Paysans de Languedoc, has documented the spread of artichoke cultivation in Italy and southern France in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the artichoke appeared as a new arrival with a new name, which may be taken to indicate an arrival of an improved cultivated variety:

The blossom of the thistle, improved by the Arabs, passed from Naples to Florence in 1466, carried by Philippo Strozzi. Towards 1480 it is noticed in Venice, as a curiosity. But very soon veers towards the northwest ... Artichoke beds are mentioned in Avignon by the notaries from 1532 onward; from the principal towns they spread into the hinterlands ... appearing as carchofas at Cavaillon in 1541, at Chateauneuf du Pape in 1553, at Orange in 1554. The local name remains carchofas, from the Italian carciofo ... They are very small, the size of a hen's egg ... and are still considered a luxury, a vaguely aphrodisiac tidbit that one preserved in sugar syrup.

The Dutch introduced artichokes to England, where they grew in Henry VIII's garden at Newhall in 1530. From the mid-17th century artichokes 'enjoyed a vogue' in European courts. The hearts were considered luxury ingredients in the new court cookery as recorded by writers such as François Pierre La Varenne, the author of Le Cuisinier François (1651). It was also claimed, in this period, that artichokes had aphrodisiac properties. They were taken to the United States in the nineteenth century—to Louisiana by French immigrants and to California by Spanish immigrants.