what I didn’t know about artichokes

Have you ever eaten an arti­choke? You get one point if you have eaten an arti­choke in what I may call “dip-form.” I can account for a fair num­ber of you on that score because some of us lucky souls have been the recip­i­ent of my brother in law Joel’s incom­pa­ra­ble arti­choke dip involv­ing copi­ous amounts of may­on­naise and pecorino cheese, never to be under­es­ti­mated. The two-point answer is if you have actu­ally bought and eaten a jar of pre­pared arti­choke hearts, lovely in a salad or on a slice of toasted baguette with some goats cheese.

The three-point answer, the one that comes with the fluffy toy, is if you have bought a raw arti­choke and some­how dealt with it as an ingre­di­ent. And in the last few days of inten­sive polling, I have encoun­tered a sur­pris­ing num­ber of very foodie peo­ple who have if not an aver­sion, a sus­pi­cion bor­der­ing on prej­u­dice against the hum­ble choke. Why?

I think it is one of those foods, like the coconut or the crab, that must have taken a VERY, VERY hun­gry per­son to dis­cover it was edi­ble. Hon­estly, the thing is cov­ered with lethally pointy leaves that have left tiny pin­pricks on my fin­gers ever time I pre­pare one. Only one tiny por­tion of each leaf, should you sur­vive cut­ting off the tips, is edi­ble, and to eat it at ALL you have to steam the hell out of it. Then the alleged best part, the heart, is at the very bot­tom, and filled with the hor­rid choke that’s like a cross between den­tal floss and milkweed.

Well, if you’re like me, you are stub­bornly attracted to this bizarre veg­etable. I get crav­ings, and drag the things home, saw off their tops, cut the leaf tips with scis­sors, peel the leaves from the stem, and then steam them. And WITH­OUT FAIL, I boil the saucepan dry and only notice this when an acrid black smoke has filled the kitchen and ven­tured out into what­ever room I’m in at the time. What­ever sub­stance emanates from the arti­chokes into the cook­ing water turns absolutely adhe­sive when it boils dry, I can tell you.

Yet I per­sist. I take the half-cooked arti­chokes out of the dry pan and trans­fer them to another pan, and then doggedly watch it until it boils, deter­mined not to make the same mis­take twice. While it’s cook­ing, I make a drop-dead vinai­grette, although I know lots of peo­ple like to dip their chokes in melted but­ter, and oth­ers still more greed­ily in may­on­naise. No, my vinai­grette wins hands down: three parts olive oil to one part bal­samic, the juice of a lemon, some mus­tard, fresh thyme, salt and pep­per, a lit­tle pesto if I have any.

And here’s the sil­li­est part: I don’t even LIKE the heart. The Holy Grail of the arti­choke world, the heart holds no charms for me, Don Quixote-like as I am. So John gets the heart. I stick with the leaves.

Well, this week I decided that the roasted arti­choke dip made by my beloved local deli-eatery, Brooks on the Green, could surely be made by lit­tle old me, and I looked up a recipe for roast­ing arti­chokes. The recipe I found involved all the steps I described above, which is plenty of work already, THEN you slice the arti­chokes in half length­wise, remove that hor­rid choke, watch as the cut sur­faces instantly turn a very unap­peal­ing moldy-looking grey, no mat­ter how fast you rub it with lemon juice.

Once you’ve done all this, you rub the arti­choke halves all over with a mix­ture of fresh thyme, olive oil, salt and pep­per, then lay them cut side down in a foil-lined dish, with a gar­lic clove and a lemon slice under­neath each one. Then you cover the whole dish with more foil and roast it in the oven at 425 for 40 minutes.

And then…

Then what? The recipe didn’t say. So I served them, bless my igno­rant lit­tle heart, to us for din­ner, with a sharp knife and hope in my heart. Roasted arti­chokes! Finally. And I saved one to use in the dip I was so sure would be within my grasp to replicate.

Well, let me be the first to tell you, there are no cir­cum­stances on this earth under which the leaves of an arti­choke are edi­ble. They are tough. They are sharp. It was like eat­ing garlic-flavored mag­a­zine cov­ers. Or dri­vers licenses. I sim­ply could not under­stand it. I had fol­lowed the recipe pre­cisely and the recipe had many happy, con­tented com­ments fol­low­ing it. What on earth had I done wrong?

I slept on my fail­ure, dream­ing that I was being chased by arti­chokes, thrown to the ground and all my blood drained by being scraped with their nasty lit­tle leaf tops. When I awoke, I went straight to the com­puter and guess what I found? Would you believe there are videos on YouTube teach­ing peo­ple to roast arti­chokes? This is a very strange world. So I duly watched it. And I dis­cov­ered the dirty lit­tle secret. You eat a roasted arti­choke in pre­cisely the same way you eat a steamed one: you pull the leaves out one by one and scrape the base along your teeth. That’s STILL the only part of the leaf you can eat. After going to all that trouble!

I slunk into the deli yes­ter­day under the weight of my dis­as­ter. “Oh, we get the arti­chokes in ready-roasted. And we use only the heart. The leaves aren’t worth any­thing.” NOW they tell me.

I felt so dumb. Imag­ine being middle-aged and a not-inexperienced cook, and still think­ing you can eat the leaves of an arti­choke, even with a STEAK knife. It can’t be done.

I felt so exhausted by the whole endeavor that it will be awhile before I buy another arti­choke. Although it’s not the poor thing’s fault I was so igno­rant. But for the fore­see­able future, my table will be graced with some nice, harm­less, inno­cent and most impor­tant, SELF-EXPLANATORY… broccoli.