SC - artichokes

[Nanna Rognvaldardottir]

Cariadoc wrote:

>Does anyone know why the entirely different American vegetable got
>called an artichoke at all?


Probably because the first European who described them (Samuel de Champlain,
who encountered them on Cape Cod in1605) thought they tasted like artichokes
(or cardoons, which are related to artichokes). Champlain and Marc Lescarbot
returned to France in 1607 and seem to have brought the vegetable back with
them. Ten years later, Lescarbot wrote that the roots were so popular in
France that "today all the gardens are full of them".

Now the Jerusalem part is much more interesting. It is possibly a corruption
of Italian "girasole" (sunflower). The alternative theory is that Jerusalem
is a corruption of Terneuzen - a town in the Netherlands where artichokes
were grown in the early 17th century - a Dutch book of 1618 says the tuber
is known in the Netherlands as the "artichoke-apple of Ter Neusen".

The French name topinambour is actually the name of a Brazilian tribe - some
natives were brought to Paris in 1613, probably arrived at the same time as
the tuber was first seen in significiant quantities in the street markets,
and somehow the Indians and the new vegetable were mixed up, so for
centuries it was commonly believed that the topinambour came from South
America (in France at least - don´t know if this was also believed in
England, for instance).

Nanna