Consider the artichoke

And why to support your local farmer and CSA box

My husband Peter loves artichokes, partly because his parents loved them. He has some special artichoke plates of theirs that are molded with places for the heart and discarded leaves that we bring out every time we eat them, every spring. He makes the same lemon butter sauce to dip them in that his father made. He steams the artichokes and we eat them from the toughest, spiniest part of the thistle inward to the heart. The difficulty getting there, scraping every leaf with your teeth on your way to the meat is part of the ritual. The reward is the heart, the buttery lemon silky soft heart, with its earthy, nutty taste.

We invited our good friend Peppe to dinner one night and served artichokes. 

Beautiful baby-sized artichokes from martinsfarmtotable.com that I’m cooking for dinner. Most of this will be compost.

Peppe is from Sardinia and one of the best cooks I know, though I would not tell him that directly because it would make him think I don’t know very many good cooks, not like the ones he grew up with on his sea-scented island. Anyway, when Peppe first came to San Francisco he didn’t speak much English, and my friends he was staying with (they knew his cousin) called me and asked me to speak Italian with this guy. I was always happy to practice my Italian, and introduced him to another Italian guy I met on craigslist when he was looking for an apartment, Victor, and though he didn’t take the apartment, he came to dinner with Peppe and some other friends and we had the first of many lively dinner parties.

I like to cook, but I’d also spent enough time in Italy to realize that I was out of my league with these guys. They were so polite when they came to dinner that when I asked them for advice about how to make the pasta for a dinner party, they — and Peppe in particular— just kind of took over. Then we served some fabulous dish that made everyone at the table praise me for my culinary skills. I tried to demur, saying that really Peppe had, um, helped, but nevertheless a lot of people got the distinct impression that I was a truly gifted Italian cook.

It took awhile for Peppe’s English to become fluent enough to understand what was going on, and really I should have come clean before then, but when he realized that I was getting all the praise for his cooking, rather than being annoyed, he admired what he came to call my Napolitana spirit, and we became even better friends. 

Eventually, Peppe stopped cooking at my dinner parties, though he still came, because while I do not have his cultural advantages when it comes to cooking, nor the materia prima that he grew up with, I started improving my Italian dishes, especially on the risotto front. 

So recently, about 20 years after I first met Peppe, we invited him for dinner and served artichokes.

Peter’s parents’ artichoke plates

I’d had artichokes at Peppe’s house once, when he cooked them in a dish with potatoes and garlic and olive oil he smuggled in from Sardinia and, predictably, they were very good. You could have served cardboard with that Sardinian olive oil, though, and I would’ve eaten it with gusto.

When he came over for dinner, we placed a whole big artichoke globe in its special artichoke dish in front of Peppe and gave him his little dish of lemon butter. Then we started in on our ritual of tearing off the leaves, dipping them in sauce, and scraping them with our teeth.

“I’ve never eaten carciofi like this,” Peppe said, as he began to delicately tug the spiny outer leaves off, one by one, grimacing but game.

The Giant Artichoke is in Castroville

That surprised me, because artichokes come from the Mediterranean, probably specifically Sicily. They’re ancient. There are probably frescoes of artichokes lost in the rubble of Pompei. (In fact, Googling this right now, it turns out there is a healthy academic debate about whether the pineapple depicted in Pompei murals is actually an artichoke, which reminds me why I didn’t go into academia). Artichokes are so old that they date back to Zeus, who was visiting his brother Poseidon one day when, emerging from the sea, he spied a beautiful human woman and when she was unimpressed by the fact that he was a god, he took the opportunity to seduce her. Her name was Cynara, and he liked her so much that he decided to make her a goddess, to keep her in her pied-a-terre on Olympia. Cynara agreed, but once installed as Zeus’ mistress, for whenever Hera happened to be away, Cynara started to miss her mother and her home. She snuck back to the mortals to visit, and upon her return, Zeus discovered that she’d been consorting with mortals, which was ungoddesslike, and he felt betrayed. Zeus was so enraged by her behavior that he hurled her back to earth and transformed her into an artichoke.

No wonder it has spines.

Anyway, the Greek philosophy and naturalist Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.) wrote of the artichokes being grown in Italy, so I was surprised Peppe had never eaten them the way we always eat them.

It turned out that from Peppe’s point of view—and the point of view of all Italians, it seems—we were feeding him compost. Italians typically throw away everything but the heart, unless they are baby artichokes, in which case they may eat them raw with some olive oil, or roasted in pasta.

I was lucky last week to have some beautiful baby artichokes in my farm box. We have been getting an amazing farm box from martinsfarmtotable.com since the beginning of COVID. He used to grew his glorious vegetables mainly for restaurants, then pivoted when those restaurants temporarily closed. He has all sorts of vegetables you never find unless you go to Berkeley Bowl or somewhere – like cardoons, which are also related to thistles, which you have to strip and boil to death before eating, which shows how desperate for food someone once was to try it, and how well they were rewarded for their efforts.

There’s a lot of compost with baby artichokes

So I tried cooking those artichokes the way Italians do, chopping off the tops and bottoms, picking off any tough-looking leaves, then roasting them with olive oil and salt. Then I put the roasted artichokes in a pan with a sofritto of olive oil, garlic, red pepper flakes, some dissolved anchovy, and a squirt of lemon. I put that on gemelli pasta. Peter pronounced it one of the best pastas I’ve ever made.

My roasted artichoke pasta was amazing, if I say so myself (and I always do).

Since it’s the season, I ordered more artichokes this week from martinsfarmtotable.com, and asked Martin the farmer (who is clearly an amazing chef, judging from his recipe know-how) how long these babies would be babies. He told me that they aren’t actually baby artichokes, but full-grown artichokes that are smaller than the big globe artichokes, harvested on the same plant.

“Baby-sized, then,” I said.

He nodded and told me that instead of roasting them, I should try boiling them whole in acidulated water (add some vinegar or lemon) before adding them to the garlic-red pepper flakes-olive oil sofritto. So that’s what’s for dinner tonight.

And wine with the pasta? That’s difficult. Artichokes contain a compound called cynarine, named after our temporary goddess-turned-artichoke Cynara, which makes wine taste much sweeter than normal. The white wine I was drinking, a Pinot Grigio, tasted terribly sweet with the artichokes, like I’d opened a cheap Chardonnay. So what do you drink?

Apparently, whatever it is, it has to be bone dry. Some people drink fino sherry with artichokes, which sounds like a fine idea if I had fino sherry in the house. I checked out an article in The Eater, and found that San Francisco sommelier Sarah Knoefler (Cafe Claude) recommends a Basque varietal, Txakoli, because it’s slightly sparkly, very dry, with mineral flavors. “The effervescence helps with the pairing; it’s almost like the bubbles break up the reaction with the cynarine,” she advises. A sauvignon blanc could work, but it’s tricky, since some veer toward the sweet side.

Txakoli isn’t in everyone’s cellar, though I do have a bottle (I will save the story of my “cellar” for another post), but Knoefler says that if the artichokes are roasted or prepared in fat there’s more leeway, since the fat breaks down the cyanarine, in which case she recommends a Verdelho from Portugal or an Italian Vermentino, which has a bit of salinity that also pairs well. 

“The bottom line is that artichokes and wine aren’t foes, just choose a wine that’s bone dry, with good acidity and no oak,” she says. “From there, you can look for a specific pairing that works with the preparation, whether that’s pairing a lemon vinaigrette with a dry Sauvignon Blanc, or a fried artichoke with a Gruner Veltliner.”

So, it’s baby-sized artichokes for dinner, this time boiled in a similar sofritto as the roasted ones, with bucatini.

 Marilyn Monroe was the 1948 California Artichoke Queen

Other things to know about artichokes: 1). One hundred percent of commercial artichokes in the US are grown in California. 2). Marilyn Monroe was crowned “Queen of California Artichokes” when she was 22. In a way, she was also invited to be a goddess and then when she displeased the gods, turned into an artichoke. Read Joyce Carol Oates’ novel-based-on-a-true-story Blonde for more on that topic.

I invited Peppe over for dinner tonight for artichokes, and he declined. He said he has a cold but I think he’s afraid he’s going to be confronted with a big, thorny artichoke globe again. Little does he realize the amazing pasta he’s missing.