The globe artichoke (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus ), also known by the names French artichoke and green artichoke in the U.S., is a variety of a species of thistle cultivated as food.
The edible portion of the plant consists of the flower buds before the flowers come into bloom. The budding artichoke flower-head is a cluster of many budding small flowers (an inflorescence), together with many bracts, on an edible base. Once the buds bloom, the structure changes to a coarse, barely edible form. Another variety of the same species is the cardoon, a perennial plant native to the Mediterranean region. Both wild forms and cultivated varieties (cultivars) exist.
Description
This vegetable grows to tall, with arching, deeply lobed, silvery, glaucous-green leaves long. The flowers develop in a large head from an edible bud about diameter with numerous triangular scales; the individual florets are purple. The edible portions of the buds consist primarily of the fleshy lower portions of the involucral bracts and the base, known as the heart; the mass of immature florets in the center of the bud is called the choke or beard. These are inedible in older, larger flowers.
Etymology
The English word artichoke was borrowed in the sixteenth century from the northern Italian word (the standard modern Italian being ). The Italian term was itself borrowed either from Spanish (today usually ) or directly from the source of the Spanish word—medieval Andalusi Arabic (, including the Arabic definite article ). The Arabic form is still used in Maghrebi Arabic today, while other variants in Arabic include , and Modern Standard Arabic . These Arabic forms themselves derive from classical Arabic () singular word of the plural () meaning "scale". Other languages which derive their word for the artichoke from Arabic include Israeli Hebrew, which has the word (). The original Hebrew name (see ), which predates the Arab conquest, is , which is found in the Mishna.
Despite being borrowed from Arabic, European terms for the artichoke have in turn influenced Arabic in their own right. For example, the modern Levantine Arabic term for artichoke is (). This literally means 'earthy thorny', and is an Arabicisation (through phono-semantic matching) of the English word artichoke or other European terms like it.
As in the case of Levantine Arabic , names for the artichoke have frequently changed form due to folk etymology and phono-semantic matching. The Italian form seems to have been adapted to correspond to Italian ('arch-, chief') and ('stump'). Forms of the French word (which also derives from Arabic, possibly via Spanish) have over the years included (corresponding to , 'warm') and (corresponding to , 'height'). Forms found in English have included hartichoak, corresponding to heart and choke, which were likely associated with the belief that the inedible centre of the vegetable could choke its eaters or that the plant can take over a garden, choking out other plants.
Early history of use
The artichoke is a domesticated variety of the wild cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), which is native to the Mediterranean area. There was debate over whether the artichoke was a food among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or whether that cultivar was developed later, with Classical sources referring instead to the wild cardoon. The cardoon is mentioned as a garden plant in the eighth century BCE by Homer and Hesiod. Pliny the Elder mentioned growing of 'carduus' in Carthage and Cordoba. In North Africa, where it is still found in the wild state, the seeds of artichokes, probably cultivated, were found during the excavation of Roman-period Mons Claudianus in Egypt.
Varieties of artichokes were cultivated in Sicily beginning in the classical period of the ancient Greeks; the Greeks calling them kaktos. In that period, the Greeks ate the leaves and flower heads, which cultivation had already improved from the wild form. The Romans called the vegetable carduus (hence the name cardoon). Further improvement in the cultivated form appears to have taken place in the medieval period in Muslim Spain and the Maghreb, although the evidence is inferential only. By the twelfth century, it was being mentioned in the compendious guide to farming composed by Ibn al-'Awwam in Seville (though it does not appear in earlier major Andalusian Arabic works on agriculture), and in Germany by Hildegard von Bingen.
