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What exactly is Chicory?
By Malcolm Jolley
Rob Misfud's popular blog, Hungry in Hogtown, is typically celebrated by such heavyweights as Michael Ruhlman for its forays into molecular gastronomy. He reviews the techniques of Adria, DuFresne, Achatz and Co. and proves that this fancy cooking can be done just as easily in home kitchen than any laboratory. This rightly earns him kudos. But recently, he has been writing about a trip to Rome and the simple pleasures of the extreme emphasis on quality that the Italians place on their food. The other day, while reading him, I was struck by the following line: "Rome in the fall also means puntarelle, a crunchy, slightly bitter variety of chicory that is a regional, seasonal delicacy." Chicory? What is that exactly? Isn't that what they sang about in those instant coffee TV commercials of my 1970s childhood: get mellow, get Encore... If Misfud can deconstruct Heston Blumenthal, then surely I could figure out the precise meaning of this vegetal term. I hit the books.
First a review of the 'chicory' in question. Allan Davidson, Harold McGee, and an English import favourite of mine, Sophie Grigson's Ingredients Book do not mention puntarelle. (Grigson is the daughter of Jane and has a profile in her own right in the UK.) This goes far in explaining why I have never seen it in shops in Canada, The States or Great Britain (there are mentions of it surfacing in California farmers markets to be found on the internet). Not until I hit Anna Del Conte's Concise Gastronomy of Italy did I find an entry, albeit two rather curt lines:
This chicory (endive), originally from Lazio is eaten as a salad. The spears are cut lengthwise almost to the root and then placed in cold water, until they become curly.
Aha! Chicory is endive! Or at least a kind of endive. Makes sense. Grigson uses chicory interchangeably with radicchio, which isn't that far from witloof (white leaf), which we call "Belgian endive". Except, of course, endives aren't really endives.
The entry for 'Chicory' in Davidson's 2004 masterwork, The Oxford Companion to Food, when put together takes up more than an entire page of the big tome. It requires a table distinguishing various bitter shoots and leaves and includes several bullet point notes on common versus scientific classifications of salad matter. As much as I love The Companion, it's not so much for this sort of thing. I prefer the broad sweeps of food history and anthropology, the romance of great cuisines or the connections between dishes from around the world. But I endured the table and bullet points and deduced roughly that puntarelle shares its chicory identity with not just Belgian endive and radicchio but also with chicory. This was helpful up to a point. I now understood the broad category of chicory and, as a taxonomic bonus, could distinguish chicories from the (true) endives: escarole, frisee and the like (which, to add further confusion, are often referred to as chicoree in French). But what exactly is (bear with me) the chicory kind of chicory?
It was up to the great connector, Harold McGee, to place it all in context. It turns out the chicories and endives are all really part of the lettuce family. Once read, this rang particularly true as it jogged a memory from the first part of this decade. Mrs. Gremolata and I had joined some friends at a rented house overlooking the Tiber river about an hour northeast of Rome. We were as charmed by the view as we were by the fact that we were the only tourists we came across in the village near the house. This charm extended to the beautiful produce displayed in the family run alimentari. On our first day we made the typical mistake of the inglese shopper and touched a tomato. Once we had been properly rebuked by shopkeepers and customers alike, an escort of at least one steely-eyed, glove wearing grocer would hover around us whenever we approached the vegetables. This made us a little edgy and in a bout of fight or flight procurement we bought about a kilo of what we thought was arugula. Only it wasn't. It was chicory: bitter and spindly and in need of being cooked.
It's this kind of true chicory that provides the root which is dried, ground and mixed with coffee. The mellowing agent mentioned in that old commercial is still mixed into some French and Spanish brands and Nestle still makes Encore as a sub-brand of Nescafe. Misfud's piece on puntarelle advises the chicory is typically dressed with a Caesar-like dressing of olive oil, vinegar, anchovy and garlic, which sounds a lot more appetising and should work equally well with its cousins Belgian endive and radicchio. Maybe even escarole. Who really knows?
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