Last Sunday, we went down to the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market. One of the farmers was selling cardoons. They were bundles of stalks two feet long, and they looked pretty formidable, like great big, overgrown celery.
Cardoons are cousins to artichokes, but the stalks are cooked and eaten instead of the flower buds. They have to be boiled a long time before they are tender and lose their bitterness.
Now, I had seen cardoons for sale around here only once before, in the DuPont Circle Farmer’s Market. I had bought them and cooked them, but that farmer had not blanched them, and they were hopelessly tough and bitter. Not a good start; but these folks assured me that they had blanched them properly (which is to say they hilled up the dirt around them as they grew, to deprive the stalks of daylight and turn them pale).
And they did, indeed, look properly pale, so I bought a bundle and brought them home. They barely fit in the refrigerator.
Research indicated that they should be boiled until tender. Most recipes (in the new edition of Larousse and my go-to Italian cookbook, The Silver Spoon, were heavily into calorie-filled oil, cheese, or cream-based recommendations, but I found an exception to the rule in Silver Spoon: Cardoon Salad (Cardi In Insalata), in which the boiled cardoons are dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, chopped hard-boiled eggs, parsley and browned bread crumbs. I decided to add some leftover cooked turkey to make it a supper.
First, though, I had to cut those monster stalks up, strip the strings from the outer sides and the little “thorns” from the edges, clean them and cut them into 2-inch pieces. And part them from their wildlife. It turned out not to be a job for the squeamish.
The books were silent on the question of cardoon leaf edibility. They resembled celery stalks so closely that I thought I would include the tufts of inner-stalk leaves in the pot. This, it turns out, was a false cognate. Those leaves were so bitter they could be used to strip paint! I had to fish them all out.
When boiled for two hours, they turned a lighter shade of pale and became tender. They made a good dish of warm salad, and two large containers of leftovers. I have since added them to a frittata, to pasta with tomato sauce and cheese, and there are still some left. If the first definition of eternity is two people and a canned ham, two people and a cardoon plant is a good second!
