More Adventures with Chicory

Things get wild

Almost every week from mid-September through the rest of the semester, I bought either regular dark green chicory or puntarelle at the market and prepared it at home.  (If you haven’t read Discovering Italian Chicory you will want to start there).

In late October, stands at the market started advertising “cicoria del campo,” field chicory.  The bunches were much smaller, with smaller and more tender looking leaves.   As I usually do at markets (this is a pro tip), I watched what the older people did.  When I saw an elderly couple buy a huge bag at one stall, I followed and bought a half kilo of the same.  It was very good – the leaves were more tender with the same flavor as domesticated chicory but a little more intense.

The next week I didn’t see it at the same stand and looked for another.  Instead of “cicoria del campo,” I found “cicoria selvatica,” wild chicory.  I asked a vendor if it was really selvatica. He said yes, selvatica.  He put some in a bag and definitely overcharged me: by now I know how much a half kilo weighs and that’s about what I had in the bag but he had charged me for more than a kilo.  I wandered away wondering whether to go back and argue with him, when I saw a label with “vera cicoria selvatica” (real wild chicory) at another stand. 

This looked completely different, really and truly wild.  The plants were much bigger than what I had found the week before, sold whole, with a root at the middle, and they looked wild indeed: shorter and wider, tougher, some of them in darker shades of green, some with leaves that were coarse or even hairy.  Some of the stems were red, and the price per kilo was 50% more.  I went back to the first vendor and demanded my money back, telling him that what he sold me wasn’t really wild.  He admitted it, but defensively said that the real wild stuff is too expensive. In any case, I got a refund.  I bought the wild stuff.

When I got back to my apartment and started cleaning it, I was surprised to discover that I had at least five different species in my bag; it has been a long time since I took plant taxonomy with my friend Steve Saupe, but I can still recognize when leaves have different margins and venation. I used a plant ID app and only one of them (the one in the smallest quantity) came up as chicory.  The others were common dandelion, red seed dandelion, Italian hawksbeard, holy hawksbeard, and beaked hawksbeard. 

• From left, common chicory, holy hawksbeard, and red seeded dandelion

I was afraid that I had been cheated again, but all of these plants are edible and I decided to go ahead and cook them. I discovered that I definitely prefer chicory over the others in the assortment.

I had trouble understanding how puntarelle and chicory greens could both be called chicory by Italians, but it turns out that this was only the beginning.  Near the end of the semester I got to know my Roman neighbors – a woman my age and her mother, both born in Rome, who lived in the apartment next door.  We cooked a meal together and talked a lot about food.  When they heard that I loved chicory, they said that their favorite way to make it is in risotto, and gave me the recipe.  I asked if I should use the green normal chicory variety or the puntarelle one, and they said “Oh, no – the purple one.”  What?  Yet another chicory?

I went to the market the next day determined to find it.  I found two and bought both.

After tasting, I decided to make my risotto with the one on the right, which was bitter but not overwhelmingly so. The one on the left, with long, slender white curling leaves, was very mild, almost bittersweet: it was delicious raw and that’s how I ate it, just pulling off and eating one sprig at a time.

My neighbors insisted that use Carnaroli rice for the risotto, not Arborio or any other variety. I had never heard of Carnaroli, but I found it easily within a five minute walk, one of the many advantages of living in a neighborhood like Prati. They were very impressed that I had my own homemade chicken stock to use in the recipe.

The risotto was good, but very bitter, even for me, someone who loves bitter flavors.  When I showed my neighbors the photo of the finished product a few days later, they told me I had purchased the wrong chicory – apparently I didn’t want the round one, which they called cicoria di Chioggia, but a long one, cicoria di Treviso.  I would like to point out here that Treviso and Chiogga are not far from each other, about twenty miles north and south of Venice, respectively.  The fact that two completely different varieties of chicory come from such a small area surprised me, but it shouldn’t have: food in Italy is famously local.  And when I looked them up on the internet, I discovered that the round one I had purchased was actually cicoria di Verona, yet another variety from the same region and the one well known for being the most bitter.

I went back to the market determined to find cicoria di Treviso, and found two of them, both long: one was the mild, curly one that I had bought earlier, the one on the left above. I was pretty sure they were not using that one in a risotto: the flavor is so mild that you would hardly taste it. The other was this one, which I decided to buy and use.

My risotto was less bitter this time, but my neighbors told me later that I was wrong again: they make risotto with the very mild, curly one. 

Doing more research after the fact, I learned that both of these long ones are indeed cicoria di Treviso: the more bitter one (above) is the early variety, and the sweeter one is the late variety, cicoria di Treviso tardivo.  Apparently, all chicories become more mild in flavor as the weather gets colder.

All of these purple varieties of chicory are called radicchio in English. Italians (and some Roman vendors) use that word too, but officially they are all chicories, and were all domesticated from the original dark green chicory greens that I started with.  And it turns out that endive, another of my favorite “greens” in France, is also a form of chicory. 

As I was doing my research I noticed that a lot of web sites claim that chicory is “Italian dandelion.” I’ve eaten a lot of dandelion greens - cultivated ones that I cook in the US, raw ones in salad form in France, and two different varieties that I cooked in Rome when I bought my “really wild chicory.” To me, the flavor is a little bit different. Trying to figure out how the species are related, I spent way too much time studying the taxonomy chart of the Asteracea family of plants. Here is the most useful visual representation I found, on this Wikepedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cichorieae

The Asteracea family is so large that is is divided into “tribes” and “subtribes” before we get to the more familiar genus and species. The Chicorieae tribe alone has 93 genera (the plural of genus). The Italian chicories are all in the first subtribe on the image above, the Cicoriinae, and within that in the genus Chicorium. There are ten known species in the Chicorium genus, only two of which are cultivated and eaten. Chicorium intybus includes chicory greens, puntarelle, radicchio, Belgian endive, and chicory root - the same one that people in the north of France dry, grind, and put in their coffee. The other cultivated species, Chicorium endivia, is grown and eaten as salad greens: in France they are called escarole and frisee (curly endive). You can find pictures of these easily with google.

Dandelions are in the fourth subtribe, Crepidinae, in the genus Taraxacum, with at least 25 different species.

Interestingly, lettuce is also on this chart, in the eighth subtribe from the top, Latucinae. Within that subtribe lettuce is in the genus Latuca, with an estimated 50 to 75 different species.

Now that I’m back in the US, I’m enjoying easy access to turnip and mustard greens, but I do miss chicory. I’m going to cook some cultivated dandelion greens this week using the recipe for cicoria ripassata to see if those are an acceptable substitute.