[Sca-cooks] Cardoons vs. artichokes

[Christiane]

There was a question from Cassie about artichoke recipes, and some pondering from Duke Cariadoc about whether artichokes were found earlier in period than the 1500s.

According to this essay by Clifford A. Wright, the experts are somewhat certain that the artichoke was cultivated from the wild cardoon, possibly by the Berbers, and that at least by 1536, they were known in Italy, although one writer at the time in Venice asserts that artichokes could only be found in the gardens of the Moorish quarter.

http://www.cliffordawright.com/history/artichoke.html

There seem to be a lot of interesting books in Mr. Wright's bibliography for this essay, but most are in French, Latin, and Spanish. I wonder if any of them have been translated into English.

What's really confusing for me is that my Sicilian grandmother interchangeably used "artichoke" and "cardoon" to refer to the globe-style vegetable we are familiar with. But with cardoons, you eat the stems, not the bracts.

Gianotta