Thistles

An essay towards a recipe

It is good for a man to eat thistles, and to remember that he is an ass.

I don't exactly remember where I first came across this culinary aphorism although a cursory google tells me it is from something I have never read or heard of called Kettner's Book of The Table – anyway it gets quoted whenever a food writer with any kind of literary pretensions (me) begins to write about artichokes, so I could have read it anywhere. That an artichoke is a thistle elicits an "oh!" from anyone who learns it for the first time (also me) but becomes obvious when you see a plant in full flower, the globular base opening in a shock of purple the same in the vegetable garden as it is in Scottish heraldry – although these massive thistles like their cousins cardoons are more often grown in the UK as ornamental plants rather than vegetables.