What's that coming over the hill?

[venta]

Last weekend, ChrisC and I were wandering through the greengrocer's. Suddenly he looked over my shoulder with an expression of vague terror and exclaimed "What's that!?"


"Er," I said vaguely, "I think it's a globe artichoke."

There followed further questions. What do you do with it?

Well, actually, I have no idea. Approach it carefully and try not to make it angry, by the looks of it.

Anyway, we bought one and took it home in the hopes of finding out.

Some recipe-book browsing later, I had come to a conclusion: everyone expects you to be way more informed about artichokes if you're contemplating cooking them. Most started "trim the artichoke, and remove the hairy choke".

The who with the what now?

"Trimming" involved, I presumed, cutting off the long stem. How about the tough outer leaves? Er, probably not - removing them revealed tough inner leaves, and I started to suspect that I might have unravelled the whole thing before finding anything that wasn't tough.

I chopped the thing into wedges, and it became immediately obvious what the "hairy choke" was. Globe artichokes are full of... well, fluff, basically. In fact, given that the wretched thing seemed to be made entirely out of inedible, spiny leaves and fluff I was beginning to wonder if it was the greengrocer's idea of a joke.

Still, having de-fluffed it, I daubed the wedges with olive oil and put them in the oven. The leaves still seemd distressingly tough and rattly, and not like something that would soften on cooking. I dutifully left them in for 40 minutes and made some aioli in the blind faith something approaching food was going to come out.

Now, I'm sure you're smart, vegetable-aware people so you all know the punchline: the outer leaves (and indeed inner leaves) aren't edible, they end up baked all crispy. You peel the leaves off one by one, and scrape the tiny chunk of yummy real-artichoke from the bottom with your teeth. In the middle (one might almost say at the heart), there is a sensible-sized lump of roast artichoke. The leaf-scrapy bits are nice, but I can't help feeling that they're the vegetarian equivalent of kippers: lovely taste, but just that bit too much fannying around to be truly great.

On the plus side, a conversation I had with (I think) secretrebel over a decade ago suddenly made sense. We were chatting about what you call that extra plate you put on the table onto which to deposit the detritus of a meal... in our house it's a "bit plate" and is most commonly employed along with roast poultry dinners, so the bits and bones don't clutter up eating plates. In her[*] house it was known rather more sophisticatedly as an "ossuary".

But what call, I asked, did vegetarians have for an ossuary? One of the answers was "artichokes". And you know what? She's right. Just one globe artichoke between two[**] and suddenly we're hip-deep in bits of leaf. Leaves everywhere. We had to deploy an emergency bit plate halfway through.

[*] or, of course, possibly not her house. Possibly the house of someone else whom memory has confused with SecretRebel.
[**] we did have other stuff as well, that wasn't the whole meal, by the way.

Comments

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Mmm, delicious artichoke. It is quite a lot of faff, but there are times when that's a bonus (like when you're not really hungry, but faffing about with an artichoke will eventually convince your stomach that it's eaten).

[skorpionuk.livejournal.com]

My mother used to cook globe artichokes sometimes as a treat. I never picked her brains as to how, but I seem to recall boiling/steaming rather than roasting. She would serve it with various dips for the leaves, which makes the whole things even more picnicky. And may account for my life-long obsession with dips.

We called the choke "hair", and I don't think my sister ate the heart. Moar for me, yay!

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

I use a separate plate for boiled-egg shell fragments. Otherwise they find their way back.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ossuary is great. Doesn't cover non-bony uses, though, which as well as artichoke detritus include the shells of shellfish, tea bags, inedible seasoning (e.g. bay leaves, cinammon sticks), and even plastic serving containers or paper wrappers. The latter use doesn't crop up that often in my experience, since few restaurants are simultaneously sniffy enough to provide a special receptacle for such things and relaxed enough to serve food in individual plastic packets.

In my Francophile extended family, such a thing is always a poubelle, implicitly understood to be short for une poubelle de table, which AIUI is the ordinary, boring name for it in France. Because obviously the French have more need of such things. "Table bin" doesn't really work as a translation. One of the many great things about English is simply stealing words wholesale from other languages when we lack a good one ourselves. I feel schadenfreude for speakers of less entrepreneurial languages.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I love artichokes. So much so I used to grow my own in Oxford and Liverpool as they were so difficult to get hold of except for a tiny 2 week window. (See icon! That's a photo of one of my home grown artichokes.)

Now I'm in North London, the local grocers sell massive ones most of the year, though I'm still toying with the idea of growing my own as they're very low maintenance.

I cook mine whole in a steamer, then eat bit by bit, dipped in oil and vinegar (that's how my French mum raised me to eat them.) Minimal cooking faff, a certain amount of fiddling to actually eat.

I love them though, and buy them fairly regularly as a cheap, easy to cook food treat.

[triskellian]

In my house, it's usually 'a Cobweb' which might be coming over the hill. Occasionally 'a Puckster' if there isn't an available Cobweb to be sung to. Artichoke wouldn't scan ;-)

(Oh, and secretrebel does indeed say 'ossuary' for such porpoises, so it probably was her.)

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

My apologies for not introducing you to artichokes in your childhood; way too much faff and, IMHO, served as a trick dish by people who want to find out if you know what to do with them or not (in a U or non-U kind of way).

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

The best thing about artichokes¹ is, if you don't pick them at globe stage but instead leave them on the plant, they reveal their true nature as giant thistles:

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1 apart from being delicious to eat…

[ar-boblad.livejournal.com]

Monster by the Automatic. If more of your titles were from Guitar Hero tracks I'd earn a lot more kudo.