[Sca-cooks] More Artichoke/Cardoon

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach lilinah at earthlink.net:
>According to
>http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/book/chap6/artichoke.html
>
>"Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus L.) is similar to artichoke except that 
>it is spiny and more robust. It is cultivated, on a much smaller 
>scale than artichoke, for its edible root and thickened leafstalk. 
>The inflorescence and pollination relationships are similar to 
>artichoke (Bailey 1949*)."
>
>At a cooking workshop at Duke Cariadoc's some among us cooked 
>cardoon leaves from His Grace's garden.
>
>But if that quote is true, one eats the roots (and possibly the 
>stalk), not the leaves...
>
>Anyone with more experience care to comment?
>--
>Urtatim, formerly Anahita

I'd say that the statement that one eats the leafstalks but not the 
leaves is akin to the statement that one eats the leaf base and not 
the leaf tips of a mature globe artichoke...

Think of taking a globe artichoke and streee-eee-tching it until it's 
as long as a head of celery, but otherwise fairly similar in 
structure. That's your cardoon. You still eat the base of the leaves 
(the leaf tips are fibrous and don't have much in the way of pulp) 
and the "heart", which in the case of real cardoons, is part of the 
root.

I don't have a lot of cardoon experience, but I've seen them in 
markets, chased people obscenely with them. You know. The usual.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
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