The humble kitchen thistle. What joy.
"Artichokes stir that most vital of qualities in a cook: curiosity. With their long stalks of varying thickness, and large-leafed, they are as unlike other vegetables as they are versatile.”
Jeremy Lee, Cooking: simply and well, for one or many
The quote above, taken from Jeremy Lee’s charming new cookbook, says everything one needs to know about the artichoke. It indeed inspires curiosity in the cook, and yet, I would posit, relatively little in the layman or the everyday punter.
I went out this week to try and pick up a few artichokes to test some recipes for this newsletter. I live near a large, well-stocked outdoor food market and within walking distance of all of the big supermarkets, as well as an M&S. The reason I mention this? Not a single one of the places I tried had an artichoke for sale. I queried a few of the fruit and veg mongers, no demand, they told me, and a hot summer to boot. My memory (corroborated by the internet) tells me that peak artichoke season is from June to October/November in the UK, and they seem to be well represented on good restaurant menus, (a good way to double-check a veg’s season,) but alas, no dice. I finally tracked a crate of quite gnarly-looking globe artichokes down at my beloved Turkish supermarket, but it was a battle to secure the humble kitchen thistle. This high-street scarcity, coupled with the troublesome reputation of preparing the things, means it is no wonder the supermarkets don’t bother stocking any.
Artichokes aren’t grown extensively here in the UK. The artichoke as we know it was gradually developed from the cardoon, and early references suggest it originated in southern Italy and Sicily from around 300 B.C. It is thought to have been introduced to England in the sixteenth century, although it hasn’t made as much of an impact on our cuisine as it has in the rest of Europe. We should eat more of them, I am sure of that; our cousins in France and Italy certainly appreciate them more than we do.
I was sent on a French exchange when I was 9 years old which planted the artichoke firmly in my life. I should make it clear from the off that I was miserable on this two-week-long exchange. I missed home terribly. Gauvin, the little milquetoast who was my exchange partner, had no interest in me and thus neglected to speak to me, for one, and was a fussy little madam about almost everything he encountered. This meant that even mealtimes, the only thing we did that I had any language for, were a battlefield between Gauvin and his sweet but feeble parents, with myself left to pick over the pre-cut boiled sausage and butter pasta that seemed to be the only thing that Gauvin willingly ate. After a few days in whatever bleak northern French village it was that Gauvin and his family resided, it became clear that we were leaving to go somewhere else, and I was bundled into the back of a Renault Espace (and asked to sit on a booster seat, which was the death knell for any sense of fondness I might have felt for this family,) to be delivered somewhere else.
The somewhere else was a little bungalow somewhere on the coast in Brittany, within which Gauvin’s grandmother lived. Gauvin became another person altogether once we’d arrived in Brittany. He’d clearly holidayed here all his life, and as such, he had a gang of little rascals with whom he liked to frolic; engaged, as far I could tell, in some sort of medieval role-playing in the woods behind the bungalow. They did not want me playing with them as much as I didn’t want to play with them, so that was that. I was homesick and alone. I found a stack of rather beautifully illustrated original Tin Tin and Asterix books on the shelves of the bedroom Gauvin and I were sharing, and I worked through them with the help of a little French dictionary. At least I think I did, that is my memory, even though it seems a remarkably mature thing for a homesick little boy to do. Anyway, at some point, Gauvin’s grandmother took pity on me and invited me to come and sit with her in the kitchen. She spoke some stilted English, which was more than anyone else in the family, and sensing my interest in the machinations of her kitchen, she started to show me what she was making for each meal. She had a fondness for insipid broth-like soups, which didn’t interest me much, although she did make what I now understand to be a fiery aioli from scratch each meal, dropping a spoonful into these soups with a few croutons for good measure, a practice I very much approve of, then and now.
I took to this woman for her kindness, of course, but also because she gave short shrift to Gauvin and his acute fussiness. I have a memory of her rapping him across the knuckles with a rolled-up paper when he went into a full tantrum when confronted with one of her soups, and I think it was the happiest moment of those two weeks I spent with Gauvin. Does that make me a bad person? I hope not.
The two best things this old girl turned out of her kitchen were tongue and artichokes, separately of course. Her boiled tongue I will come to another time, but suffice to say it was revelatory; her artichokes on the other hand were simplicity personified and, as mentioned above, cemented a love of artichokes in me that remains unshaken to this day. Not that I was convinced from the off. She boiled them, you see, which is completely normal, of course. What I did not find normal was the smell. I’d occasionally been drawn into the making of ‘potions’ at home with my sisters, and the smell coming from the big pot of bubbling artichokes was the same as the smell from the potions they used to make from nettles and grass and trimmings from the flower bed. I was never drawn to tasting the potions, much as I was not initially drawn to tasting whatever was cooking away in Grandma’s big aluminium pot. I recall feeling hopeful at least when a little tied handkerchief of aromatics, no doubt a bay leaf, some parsley stalks, maybe a black peppercorn and a few other bits, was tied onto the pot handle and left to bob about in the water with the artichokes - this suggested someone striving for flavour and, even as a child, I was aligned with that instinct.
When cooked, Grandma simply drained the artichokes in a colander and sat them on a plate. The leafy-green algae scent certainly filled the kitchen, but for some reason, I trusted this woman and felt happy to follow her lead and eat these khaki orbs. In the middle of the table when we finally sat down were three little earthenware bowls with her aioli, a tapenade sort of affair, and a thick vinaigrette, high with dijon mustard and lemon juice. I’d never witnessed a big bulbous thing such as artichoke before, so watched Grandma for cues on how to eat it; but once I got the knack, and once I realised that all three of her dips were fair game, I was away.
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