Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Yid.Dish: Fancy Artichokes

Living close to San Mateo, CA, the artichoke producing capital of the US, I am lucky. For months, the delicious, complicated, decadent vegetables have appeared faithfully at my nearby farmer’s market. I usually steam them and eat the leaves plain, or possibly dipped in butter-garlic sauce. Or, if my fiance mixes up a dipping sauce of mayo and mustard, I may dip a few in there. But mostly I just eat them plain, enjoying the complex green vegetable taste.

Then I read Out of the Kitchen Adventures of a Food Writer by Jeannette Ferrary.

Ferrary is an Irish-Italian American raised in Brooklyn, and later the suburbs. The memoir covers a fascinating arc through America’s love affair with convenience food through the recent passion for local and sustainable. Her (Irish) mother’s cooking revolved around meat and potatoes, and later TV dinners. It was her (Italian) grandmother who labored over elaborate meals and loved her grandchildren through feeding them.

Although the recipes accompanying each chapter are mostly humorous punch lines to their respective chapters, (collegiate popcorn, or tea with a child, for example) the artichokes got my attention. You slather the artichokes with olive oil, garlic, lemon and parsley, cover with water and simmer until done. And they are delicious. The complex flavor of the veg is drawn out and enhanced. The original recipe calls for bread crumbs and peas, which I omitted. So, here is the adapted recipe:

4 artichokes

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Juice of 1 medium to large lemon

4 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the artichoke stem so it is flat, and cut a bit off the tips. Place artichokes in a pan big enough that all four chokes can stand on the bottom side to side. Place remaining ingredients over, in and around artichokes. Cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer until cooked, anywhere from 20-45 minutes depending on the size of the artichokes.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.