The Big Bad Artichoke

What food makes you feel most alive?

I was not an adventurous child at the table. My diet, to the extent it could be called one, was built on meat, bread, pasta, and cheese. Vegetables were largely suspect, and I ate around them.

And then one day my dad put an artichoke in front of me.

I was eight or nine, and my first impression was fear. It was enormous and armored, built like something that had survived several extinctions. Julia Child, who understood this reaction completely, once opened her artichoke episode of The French Chef with: “Here is a great big old bad artichoke — and some people are terribly afraid of it.” I was one of those people. I did not understand why anyone had decided this was food.

What happened next I can only describe as enchantment. He showed me how to pull off a leaf, drag the soft flesh from the base with my teeth, and dip the whole operation in as much butter as possible. It tasted like almost nothing. It tasted like everything. There was something about the ritual of it, the deliberate pace, the slight resistance, the reward at the bottom of each leaf, that felt nothing like eating and everything like ceremony.

I wrote about it in third grade. The essay, which I have kept for thirty-some years, concludes: ISN’T IT HEAVEN??!#^%$&*

I stand by this assessment.

And then there is the heart. This is what you are working toward the whole time, the dense, tender center hiding beneath the leaves and a layer of inedible choke you have to scrape away before you can reach it. It is genuinely labor-intensive. It is also, unambiguously, the best part. You don’t eat the heart. You earn it.

The artichoke is not, if I’m being honest with you, a nutritional powerhouse. It has its merits, fiber, some useful antioxidants, but that is not why I eat it. On the days when I most need to feed something in myself that isn’t hunger exactly, when the week has been long or my brain needs a rest from being useful, I will steam an artichoke, melt an obscene amount of butter with garlic or miso, and sit down to do the slow, methodical work of eating it leaf by leaf. There is no efficient version of this. That is entirely the point.

I have now introduced the artichoke to my daughter and stepdaughter, who have adopted it with the same enthusiasm I brought to the third-grade essay. Watching them do what I did at their age, the slight wariness at first, then the moment of conversion, then the focused, leaf-by-leaf devotion, is one of the more quietly satisfying things I have witnessed as a parent.

The relationship between a person and food is never only about nutrition. It is about memory, pleasure, ritual, the particular version of yourself that a meal calls forward. For me, the artichoke calls forward a child who discovered that a scary, impractical vegetable could be a source of genuine joy, and who has never quite gotten over it.

ISN’T IT HEAVEN??!