Cardoon Experimentation

I met a new vegetable this week. Shelley from Whistling Train Farm was selling these stalks that looked like celery on steroids. I asked about them and she told me they were cardoons.

Being a food history nerd, I'd heard of cardoons: the ancient Greeks and Romans ate them. They're relatives of artichokes, but you eat the stems, rather than the thistles. Lynn, my plant guru, says they're often used ornamentally.

I had to bring one home and play with it. I did a bit of internet research and learned that I was supposed to peel off the stringy spines, and also boil the cardoons for a while in lemon juice before preparing them.

I tried to take off the spines with a vegetable peeler and it mostly worked, except that the stringy parts I was peeling off kept getting tangled in the peeler, and when I ate the cardoons they were still kind of stringy. I'll use a paring knife next time.

I cut small pieces and boiled them in water with red wine vinegar, because I didn't have any lemon on hand. Apparently the acid is supposed to help preserve their color, because they're prone to turn grey. They did turn kind of grey, but they were pretty tasty, similar to the flavor of artichokes.

I marinated the pieces in a mustard vinagrette, something I like to do with canned artichoke hearts. I enjoyed them, but I still have a lot to learn about this new, old vegetable.