The Fallen Goddess: A Mediterranean History of the Artichoke

Part One: The Varieties of Italy

In Italy, few winter vegetables command as much respect, or as much passion, as the carciofo. Known in Sicilian dialect as cacòcciula, a term that appears in documents as early as 1416, the artichoke is not merely an ingredient here; it is a way of life. It can be grilled over charcoal, stuffed with breadcrumbs, pecorino and anchovy, sliced raw into salads with lemon and olive oil, braised slowly in white wine, fried whole in golden olive oil, or chopped through a pasta sauce. But before we get to all the ways of cooking it, it’s worth pausing to understand what exactly we’re dealing with: not all artichokes are the same, and in Italy especially, the variety matters enormously.

Italy is, in fact, one of the world’s largest producers of artichokes, and within its borders there are more than fifty distinct varieties in cultivation. These divide broadly into two great families: the round, globe-type artichokes, which tend to be thornless and fleshy, and the elongated, violet-hued varieties, which are often smaller, more intensely flavoured, and, when young enough, can even be eaten raw.

The most celebrated of the round varieties is undoubtedly the Carciofo Romanesco, also known as the Mammola or Cimarolo, grown on the coastal plains of Lazio north of Rome. Large, compact, and almost spherical, with leaves of deep green flushed with violet and, crucially, no inner spines, it is prized above all for its extraordinary tenderness. This is the artichoke of Rome: the one pressed open and braised upside-down in olive oil, water and white wine with garlic, parsley and mentuccia (wild mint) to make carciofi alla Romana, or deep-fried whole in the Jewish style, as carciofi alla Giudìa, to emerge crisp-leaved and golden as a chrysanthemum. The Romanesco has earned IGP (Protected Geographical Indication) status from the EU, one of only two Italian artichoke varieties to have done so.

Here in Sicily, however, the artichoke story takes a different turn. The island is home to a distinct family of violet artichokes, the Violetto di Sicilia, whose purple-tinged heads appear in the markets from early winter, well ahead of the Roman varieties. These are not the great globes of Lazio; they are more elongated or cylindrical in shape, their bracts streaked with deep purple fading to pale green at the centre. Two towns in particular have made the Sicilian violet artichoke their own. In Ramacca, on the volcanic plain of Catania, the Violetto Ramacchese, and its larger companion, the Teramo, grow in basalt-rich soil that gives them a distinctive sweetness with a faintly bitter finish; the town holds an annual festival in their honour every April. In Niscemi, in the province of Caltanissetta, the Violetto di Niscemi is another celebrated variety, and the town ranks as one of the most important artichoke-producing centres in all of Italy. Further west, around Menfi in the province of Agrigento, the Spinoso di Menfi is a thornier, older variety whose cultivation dates back to the nineteenth century, a reminder that artichoke-growing in Sicily long predates any modern agricultural intervention.

Beyond Sicily, other notable Italian varieties include the Carciofo Brindisino of Puglia, an early and very tender variety perfect for eating raw; the Carciofo di Paestum of Campania, the second IGP-protected variety alongside the Romanesco; the Carciofo Violetto di Sant’Erasmo, grown in the extraordinary microclimate of the Venetian lagoon and considered perhaps the most refined of all the violet types; and the Spinoso Sardo of Sardinia, a fiercely thorned but nutty and delicious variety with DOP status that can also be sliced and eaten raw.

Part Two: Origins: Where Did the Artichoke Come From?

The artichoke, botanically speaking, is a cultivated thistle: a domesticated descendant of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), a spiny, silver-leaved plant that grows naturally around the Mediterranean basin and the Atlantic islands of Macaronesia (the Canaries, Madeira, and the Azores). It is, in other words, a plant of the ancient western Mediterranean world, and one of the more remarkable achievements of early agriculture: someone, at some point, looked at a viciously thorned thistle and thought to make it edible.

When and where exactly this domestication happened remains, to scientists, genuinely uncertain, but a body of genetic and historical research points to Sicily as a leading candidate for where it happened. The ancient Greeks were already cultivating the plant there, calling it kaktos, and the ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus noted, intriguingly, that the artichoke was not found in mainland Greece, suggesting it was a western, insular thing, something that came from beyond the Pillars of Hercules, from the far edge of the known world. What we can say with confidence is that by the first century AD, Pliny the Elder was writing about edible thistles cultivated in Carthage and Córdoba, and that seeds of an apparently cultivated variety have been found at the Roman quarry site of Mons Claudianus in Egypt. Rome knew the artichoke. It ate them pickled in honey and vinegar, seasoned with cumin. And then, with the fall of Rome, the artichoke seems to have retreated from European tables.

What saved it, and transformed it into the refined vegetable we know today, were the Arabs. During the medieval period, Arab agronomists in the Maghreb and in Andalusia developed and refined the cultivated artichoke, writing about it extensively and spreading its cultivation across North Africa and into Muslim-controlled Spain. And it was the Arabs, the Saracens as they are remembered in Sicily, who brought the improved artichoke back to the island during their period of rule from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Sicily, which had perhaps been the original birthplace of artichoke cultivation in antiquity, received the plant back from the other side of the Mediterranean, transformed. This is why the Sicilian word cacòcciula and the Italian carciofo are both directly descended from Arabic: from al-kharshūfa, itself derived from the Arabic harshafa, meaning “scale”, a beautifully literal reference to the layered bracts of the flower head.

The story of the English word “artichoke” is equally revealing. It arrived in the sixteenth century via the northern Italian dialect form articiocco, itself a borrowing from Arabic, filtered through Spanish alcachofa. But English ears and mouths did what they always do with foreign words: they bent them into something more familiar. You can trace the folk etymologies in the old spellings: hartichoak, as if the plant had something to do with a heart and a choke. Which, come to think of it, is not entirely wrong: the heart is the most prized part of the artichoke, and the fibrous inner mass, the inedible fuzz at the centre, will, if you try to eat it, choke you.

The artichoke reached northern Italy proper in the fifteenth century. In 1466, a Florentine banker named Filippo Strozzi brought it from Naples to Florence, and from there its spread through the courts and gardens of Renaissance Europe was rapid. By the early sixteenth century it had reached France, carried, some say, by Catherine de’ Medici when she left Florence in 1533 to marry the future Henri II. She famously adored them, eating them to excess, and reportedly scandalised the French court by doing so in public. Until that point, artichokes had been considered, on account of their supposed aphrodisiac properties, a vegetable unsuitable for women. Catherine, apparently, disagreed.

Part Three: Across the Aegean: The Artichoke in Turkey and Greece

The artichoke is a Mediterranean plant, and yet, as anyone who has travelled widely around the Mediterranean will have noticed, it is not equally at home everywhere. Go to Morocco, to Tunisia, to Egypt, and you find it in abundance. Go to Sicily, Sardinia, Puglia, the plains of Lazio, and it defines the winter table. But travel east along the coast, cross into Turkey, and something curious happens: the artichoke retreats. It does not disappear, but it becomes a regional speciality rather than a national one, confined almost entirely to the Aegean coast: to İzmir, to the small peninsula town of Urla, to the fish restaurants of Çeşme and Bodrum, to the mezze tables of the western shore.

This is, when you think about it, rather strange. Anatolia is an ancient agricultural land. The wild cardoon, the prickly thistle ancestor of the cultivated artichoke, grows freely across the Mediterranean basin, and there is no obvious climatic reason why the artichoke should not have taken hold across the whole of Turkey as it did in Italy or Spain. Yet go inland from the Aegean coast, into Central Anatolia, into the Black Sea region, into the great meat-and-grain heartland of the country, and the artichoke is essentially absent from the cuisine. The Turkish word for it, enginar, is rarely heard much east of Bursa.

The explanation lies, I think, in the history of who cooked what and where. The Turks who swept into Anatolia from Central Asia in the eleventh century brought with them a food culture built around meat, wheat, and fermented dairy: nomadic foods, foods of the steppe. The artichoke is emphatically not a nomadic food. It is a settled, agricultural, Mediterranean food, the product of centuries of patient cultivation in one place. What artichoke culture survived in Anatolia did so, it seems, in the places where the older Mediterranean civilisations had put down the deepest roots: on the Aegean coast, where the Greeks had been farming since antiquity, and where the Ottoman palace cuisine eventually absorbed, in its cosmopolitan Istanbul way, certain influences from the Greek and Jewish communities of the city.

And it is through Greece that the artichoke most naturally bridges the western and eastern Mediterranean. In Greek, the artichoke is the aginara, and this word, unlike the Italian carciofo or the English artichoke, does not come from Arabic at all. It comes from something far older: the Latin cynara, which is itself the Latinisation of the Greek kynara. And here we arrive at one of the more beautiful pieces of etymological layering in all of food history. Kynara, the Greek name for the artichoke, gave the Romans their word cynara, which became the scientific genus name for the plant that survives to this day: Cynara cardunculus. Greek mythology, meanwhile, explained the name differently: Zeus, the story goes, fell in love with a beautiful girl called Cynara, and when she dared to defy him, he hurled her from Olympus and transformed her into a thistle. The artichoke, in other words, is a fallen goddess: all spines on the outside, tender heart within.

Now consider the word enginar. It sounds nothing like the Arabic al-kharshūfa from which the Italian and English words descend. It sounds, instead, like aginara. Like kynara. The Turkish word for the artichoke, in other words, appears to have come not from the Arabs who carried the cultivated artichoke westward through Spain and Sicily, but from the Greeks, passed across the Aegean from one civilisation to another through centuries of proximity, trade, and shared table. And the Armenians, living for centuries between the Greek world and the Persian, did the same: their word for the artichoke is enguinar, essentially identical to the Turkish enginar, both borrowed from the same Greek root. It is a small but quietly remarkable thing: that two peoples with such a turbulent and often tragic shared history should have reached, independently, for the same word from the same ancient source. In the kitchen, at least, Armenian and Turkish cuisine have always been closer than politics would suggest.

And then consider the Italian amaro Cynar, that dark, bittersweet liqueur made from artichokes, whose name reaches back through Latin to the same Greek root. Cynar, kynara, aginara, enguinar, enginar: five languages, five cultures stretched from the Veneto to the Caucasus, all holding the same ancient word between them like a thread through the labyrinth.

The great signature artichoke dish of the Turkish Aegean is zeytinyağlı enginar: artichoke hearts braised in olive oil, stuffed with a simple mixture of dill, spring onion, lemon, and sometimes rice, served cool as a meze. It is a dish of extraordinary delicacy and restraint, and in its own way it echoes the Greek aginares alla Polita, artichokes in the style of the City, meaning Constantinople: a stew of artichoke hearts with potatoes, carrots, lemon and dill that carries in its very name the memory of a city where Greek, Turkish, Armenian, and Jewish cooks once worked in the same neighbourhoods, drawing from the same markets, feeding the same cosmopolitan hunger. The artichoke, patient and adaptable as ever, absorbed all of them.

Part Four: A Personal History: The Artichoke of Memory

Before we get to the ways the Sicilians cook their artichokes, I want to make a short detour into the personal. Because for me, the artichoke is not merely a vegetable. It is a memory.

I grew up in England, and my mother kept a kitchen garden. In it, she had a small patch of artichokes, stately, silvery things, with their great arching leaves, and in summer, when they produced their heads, eating them was considered a real event, a luxury. They were prepared in the simplest possible way: boiled, and brought to the table with melted butter poured over them. And then we would sit and eat them leaf by leaf, pulling each one off and nibbling at its tender, buttery base, which, if you’ve never done this, is a surprisingly small reward for the effort involved. The edible part of each leaf is just the very bottom, a thin scrape of soft flesh, and yet somehow the ritual of it, the slow, meditative peeling, the communal bowl of butter, the pile of discarded leaves growing at the centre of the table, made it feel like a feast.

The real prize came at the end, and it came with ceremony. Once all the leaves were gone, you arrived at what my mother always called the witch’s cap: a cluster of small, pale inner leaves that looked, to a child, genuinely mysterious and rather exciting. But the witch’s cap was a trick; those inner leaves were not for eating. You pulled them away to reveal something stranger still: a dense mat of fine, silvery bristles, like the pelt of some small creature. These were the choke: the immature florets of what would, if left on the plant, become the thistle flower. You had to gouge them out with a knife, scraping carefully until all the fibre was gone. And then, finally, you reached the heart.

The heart, of course, was the point. It always is. But I confess that, as a child, it was always something of a disappointment, not because it wasn’t delicious, because it was, but because after all that patient work, all that leaf-by-leaf anticipation, the heart itself was barely a mouthful. A small, tender disc of compressed sweetness, slippery with butter. Gone in two bites. It taught me, I think, something about the relationship between effort and pleasure that no other vegetable quite manages.

Now: those artichokes my mother grew. It was only much later in life that I began to wonder what, exactly, they were. The story of how the plants arrived in her garden is itself rather wonderful. When I married and came to live in Sicily, my father-in-law dug up some artichoke plants from his garden here on the island and sent them to my mother in England, not in a box or a parcel, but, with beautiful Sicilian improvisation, in an envelope. Through the post. And they arrived, and she planted them, and they grew. Thirty years later, those same plants, or rather their descendants, since artichokes spread and multiply of their own accord, are still producing in her English garden.

But here is the curious thing. The Sicilian artichokes we eat here in the Violetto di Sicilia season are a winter and early spring vegetable: February, March, April. The plants in my mother’s English garden, however, produce their heads in September. Different climate, different timing, which is perfectly logical. What is less logical, and more interesting, is this: they were almost certainly never true globe artichokes in the modern cultivated sense at all. They were almost certainly closer to cardoons, the wild or semi-wild ancestor from which the cultivated artichoke was eventually developed. This would explain a great deal about my childhood memories of them: the effort involved, the relatively meagre reward, the slight bitterness that even the butter couldn’t quite mask. We were, unknowingly, eating something much older and wilder than a proper carciofo, something closer to what the ancient Greeks or Romans might have recognised, before centuries of Arab agricultural refinement gave us the plump, tender, violet-streaked beauties that pile up in the markets of Catania and Niscemi every February.

I find that rather wonderful. The artichoke, it turns out, has been travelling back and forth across the Mediterranean for centuries: from Sicily to the Arab world and back, from Naples to Florence in a banker’s cart, from Italy to the French royal court in Catherine de’ Medici’s luggage, and eventually, in a small brown envelope, from a Sicilian kitchen garden to a quiet corner of England, where it still flowers every September, stubbornly, beautifully, and not quite what anyone expected.

Part Five: How to Eat Them: The Artichoke in the Italian Kitchen

Let us begin in Rome, because in Rome they do it best, or at least, they would have you believe so, and on this particular matter it is difficult to argue. There are two great Roman preparations, and they are so different from each other that they might almost be different vegetables.

The first is carciofi alla Romana. The artichoke, a Romanesco always for this dish, that great globe of a thing, is trimmed back to its pale tender heart, its stem peeled and left long, its inner leaves prised open with the thumbs to reveal the cavity within. Into this cavity goes a mixture of garlic, parsley, and mentuccia, the small-leafed wild mint that grows in the Roman countryside and tastes of something older and more aromatic than the garden variety. The artichokes are then stood upside down in a deep pan, stems pointing at the ceiling, bathed in olive oil and a little water, and left to braise slowly over a low flame until they collapse into a state of absolute, yielding tenderness. They are served warm, glistening, with their cooking juices poured over them. It is one of the simplest dishes in the world, and one of the best.

The second is carciofi alla Giudìa, artichokes in the Jewish style, and this is where we must pause, because behind this dish lies a history. The Jewish community of Rome is among the oldest in the world, predating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and for centuries its members lived and cooked within the narrow streets of the Ghetto, in the bend of the Tiber below the Capitoline Hill. It was here, in the cucina giudaico-romanesca, that carciofi alla Giudìa was born: the artichoke trimmed, then plunged whole into deep, very hot olive oil, and pressed flat with a weight so that its leaves splay out like the petals of a sunflower, frying until the outer leaves are shatteringly crisp and bronze and the heart within remains soft and sweet. It is an extraordinary thing to eat. Today you can still find it in the old trattorie of the Ghetto, at Sora Margherita, at Giggetto al Portico d’Ottavia, and it remains one of the definitive Roman dishes, a reminder that the Jewish kitchen has shaped Italian food in ways that are rarely properly acknowledged.

Beyond Rome, the artichoke disperses itself through the Italian kitchen in a dozen different guises. In Sicily, the most elemental preparation is the cacucciulata: the artichoke grilled directly over charcoal, its outer leaves scorched and discarded, the heart within emerging smoky and tender, dressed with nothing more than olive oil, lemon, and perhaps a little salt. But Sicilians also stuff them, opening the leaves and pressing into each one a mixture of breadcrumbs, pecorino, anchovy, garlic, and parsley, then braising the whole thing slowly in a covered pan until the stuffing is fragrant and the artichoke has absorbed every flavour around it. There is also caponata di carciofi, a version of that great Sicilian sweet-and-sour relish in which the artichoke joins aubergine, celery, olives and capers in a tangle of agrodolce, vinegar and a whisper of sugar, that improves enormously over the course of a day or two.

In Puglia, the artichoke goes into the oven. Carciofi gratinati, artichokes au gratin with breadcrumbs, cheese, and olive oil, is the classic preparation, but Puglians also braise them with potatoes and onions in great earthenware pots, or eat the young, tender Brindisino raw, pulled apart leaf by leaf and dipped into olive oil as you might eat crudités. In Sardinia, the Spinoso Sardo, that ferociously thorned variety, is sliced paper-thin when young enough and dressed simply with lemon and oil, its nuttiness coming through cleanly without any cooking at all.

And then there is what the artichoke does to things around it. Artichoke risotto, risotto ai carciofi, is a dish of great subtlety, the bitterness of the vegetable absorbed and softened by the starch of the rice, the whole thing enriched at the end with butter and parmesan. Artichoke pasta, particularly with a simple sauce of artichokes, garlic, white wine and a little cream, is found across central and northern Italy. And preserved in oil, sott’olio, the artichoke heart becomes something else again: concentrated, intense, slightly fermented, extraordinary on bruschetta or alongside a plate of salumi. It is, in this form, essentially a condiment, one of those background presences in the Italian larder that quietly improves everything it touches.

One last thing, which belongs less in the kitchen than in the drinks cabinet. Cynar, that dark, bittersweet amaro made from artichoke leaves whose name reaches back, as we have seen, all the way to the Greek kynara, has been produced in Italy since 1952. It is drunk over ice as an aperitivo, or mixed with tonic or orange juice, and its flavour is exactly what you would expect: herbal, slightly bitter, earthy, with that curious quality all artichoke products share of making whatever you drink afterwards taste faintly, pleasantly sweeter. It is, in its way, the whole Mediterranean in a glass: ancient, complex, and not quite like anything else.

The artichoke’s journey, from a wild Mediterranean thistle to a fallen goddess to the centre of a dozen different national tables, is really the story of the whole region: one long conversation carried on between neighbouring kitchens, empires, and languages. It is exactly the kind of history that means more once you have stood in the market that sells the thing, or sat down to eat it where it has always been eaten. Our Treasures of Sicily tour visits the markets and kitchens of Sicily in artichoke country; the Puglia and Matera Tour and Classical Greece Tour follow the same vegetable further along its route east; and the Armenia & Georgia Tour and Treasures of Western Turkey tour take you to the two far corners of the Mediterranean world where the very same ancient Greek word for the plant still quietly survives.