Chicory

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Common chicory, Cichorium intybus, is a woody perennial with bright blue flowers, native to Europe, North Africa and western Asia. It looks like a roadside weed, and in many places it behaves like one. Yet cooks, brewers, farmers and food manufacturers have all found a use for it. Some treat it as a vegetable. Some treat it as a stand-in for something more expensive. Others extract an ingredient from it for modern packaged foods. How did one bitter plant take on so many roles? What made people reach for it when other things ran short? And what do its farming and its folklore reveal about the way people decide what counts as food?

  101273

• 2. Blue Weed Underfoot

  ›

  Standing as tall as 1.5 meters, a flowering chicory plant carries a tough, grooved stem that is more or less covered in hairs. The leaves hang on stalks, are lance-shaped and unlobed, and shrink toward the top. They run from 7.5 to 32 centimeters long and 2 to 8 centimeters wide. Flowers appear from March until October. The petals are usually light blue or lavender, though white or pink blooms have rarely been described. Beneath each flower head sit two rows of bracts, with a longer, upright inner row and a shorter, spreading outer one. The seed carries small scales at its tip.

  Two sesquiterpene lactones, lactucin and lactucopicrin, are the main source of the plant's bitterness. Chemists have also found aesculetin, aesculin, cichoriin, umbelliferone, scopoletin and 6,7-dihydrocoumarin, along with further lactones and their glycosides.

  Roadsides, waste places and other disturbed ground are where chicory thrives, and it can even survive in lawns. A low rosette of leaves at its base lets it resprout after cutting. It rarely moves into undisturbed natural areas. Limestone soils suit it best, though it tolerates a wide range of conditions and counts as drought tolerant. Bees, butterflies and flies all feed on it.

  Early European colonists brought chicory to North America. It is now also common in China and Australia, where it has become widely naturalized, and it is more common wherever rain is abundant. Analysis of weedy populations in North America shows that they descend partly from domesticated cultivars, so some of the weed is really an escaped crop. The plant's scientific name, as it happens, begins with a Greek word for a different plant altogether.

  81261517

• 3. A Name Borrowed

  ›

  The Greek word κίχορα, written kíkhora and meaning endive, lies behind the genus name Cichorium. The species name intybus is a variant of intibus, which also means endive. Intibus is the ultimate source of the English word endive itself. Confusingly, the true endive is Cichorium endivia, a separate species in the same genus, and not Cichorium intybus at all.

  Blue daisy, blue dandelion, blue sailors, blue weed and wild endive are among the regional names that common chicory has gathered. Cornflower is sometimes mixed into the list too, although that name is also commonly used for a different plant, Centaurea cyanus. Varieties of the leafy form, var. foliosum, carry names of their own, including radicchio, radichetta, red endive, sugarloaf, French endive and Belgian endive.

  The plant's history reaches back to ancient Egypt. In ancient Rome, cooks made a dish called puntarelle from chicory sprouts. The poet Horace mentioned chicory while describing his own diet, which he presented as very simple. He wrote: Me pascunt olivae, me cichorea levesque malvae. In translation, that reads: As for me, olives, endives, and light mallows provide sustenance. Chicory was first described as a cultivated plant in the 17th century, and the arrival of coffee in Europe would give it a very different career.

  61622160

• 4. Bitter Greens

  ›

  Ninety-two percent of a raw chicory leaf is water, with 5 percent carbohydrate, 2 percent protein and almost no fat. A 100 gram portion supplies 23 calories. It also supplies more than 20 percent of the Daily Value of vitamin K, vitamin A and vitamin C, plus some B vitamins and manganese. Vitamin E and calcium appear in moderate amounts. Raw endive, a different plant, is 94 percent water and offers little nutrition by comparison. The entire chicory plant is edible.

  In Liguria, wild chicory leaves go into preboggion, a traditional mixture of greens. In Apulia they are paired with fava bean puree in a dish called fave e cicorie selvatiche. Albanian cooks simmer the leaves and marinate them in olive oil, using them as a spinach substitute or as filling for byrek. On Crete, a wild variety called stamnagathi, or spiny chicory, is served as a salad with olive oil and lemon juice. The flavor is also appreciated in the southern part of India.

  Older wild leaves are the most bitter. Cooks boil them and discard the water to soften the taste. The greens are then sautéed with garlic, anchovies and other ingredients, and they can be tossed with pasta or served beside meat.

  Cultivated chicory is grown mostly for raw salad leaves, and it falls into three broad types. Radicchio has variegated red or red and green leaves and a bitter, spicy taste that mellows when it is grilled or roasted. Italy grows it in many varieties. The best known come from Treviso, Verona and Chioggia, and they are classified as IGP. In Greece it is called radiki and is mainly boiled in salads or baked into pies.

  Catalogna chicory, Cichorium intybus var. foliosum, is the second type. It covers a whole subfamily of varieties, some related to Belgian endive and some to radicchio, and it is used throughout Italy. The third type, Belgian endive, is defined less by its variety than by the dark in which it grows.

  2930213339

• 5. Growing in the Dark

  ›

  White leaf is the literal meaning of witloof, or witlof, the Dutch name for Belgian endive. Italy calls it indivia and Spain endivias. In the United Kingdom it is simply chicory, in Australia witlof, and in France and Canada endive. In parts of northern France, in Wallonia and in Luxembourg, it is a chicon.

  The method behind its pale color starts with a harvested root. Growers let that root sprout indoors with no sunlight at all. Without light the leaves stay pale and never open out, a process called etiolation. The result is a small, tight head of cream-colored, bitter leaves. Shoppers often meet it wrapped in blue paper, which shuts out light to preserve the pale color and delicate flavor.

  The technique was discovered by accident in the 1850s at the Botanical Garden of Brussels, in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, Belgium. Belgium now exports chicon to over 40 countries, although France is today the largest producer.

  The smooth, creamy white leaves can be stuffed, baked, boiled, cut up, cooked in a milk sauce or simply eaten raw. The whiter the leaf, the less bitter it tastes. Cutting out the harder inner part of the stem at the base of the head before cooking removes more of the bitterness. Root chicory, meanwhile, was being put to work in a very different way, as a stand-in for coffee.

  3637384034

• 6. Coffee's Stand-In

  ›

  Once coffee reached Europe, the Dutch judged that chicory made a lively addition to the bean drink.

  In 1766, Frederick the Great banned the importation of coffee into Prussia. That ban led to the development of a coffee substitute by Christian Gottlieb Förster, an innkeeper in Brunswick who died in 1801. Förster won a concession in 1769-70 to manufacture it in Brunswick and Berlin. By 1795, Brunswick alone had 22 to 24 factories of this kind.

  In 1779, Lord Monboddo described the plant as the "chicoree", a pot herb that the French cultivated. In France under Napoleon, chicory often turned up either as a coffee substitute or as an adulterant slipped into real coffee. Across the Channel, a coffee and chicory essence called Camp Coffee has been on sale in the United Kingdom since 1885.

  Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War adopted chicory as a coffee substitute, and it has since become common in the United States. By the 1840s, the port of New Orleans ranked second only to New York as an importer of coffee. Then Union naval blockades during the Civil War cut off the port. Louisianans began adding chicory root to their coffee, and the habit became a long-standing tradition. Chicory root has also long been used in American prisons as a coffee substitute.

  Blockades were only one kind of shortage. Economic crises sent people back to the roasted root again and again.

  6364656766

• 7. Hard Times in the Cup

  ›

  The Great Depression of the 1930s pushed chicory into wider use, as did World War II in Continental Europe. East Germany offers a later example. Between 1976 and 1979 the country went through what became known as the East German coffee crisis. Its answer was Mischkaffee, or mixed coffee, which combined chicory with sugar beet and rye.

  In France, a mixture of 60 percent chicory and 40 percent coffee is sold under the trade name Ricoré. Around the Mediterranean, where the plant is native, the roots are baked, roasted, ground and added to coffee. The habit also appears in Indian filter coffee, in parts of Southeast Asia and South Africa, and in the southern United States, particularly New Orleans. Spanish, Turkish, Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian cooks add it as well.

  Some beer brewers roast chicory to flavor stouts, which people expect to taste a little like coffee. Others add it to strong blond Belgian-style ales to boost the hops. The result is called witloofbier, after the Dutch name for the plant. The roots can also be cooked like parsnips.

  Chemists were about to find that the root stores something far more useful to industry than a roasted flavor.

  6821604220

• 8. Fiber, Fodder and Folklore

  ›

  Around 1970, researchers discovered that chicory root contains up to 20 percent inulin, a polysaccharide similar to starch. Fresh root may hold 13 to 23 percent inulin as a share of its total carbohydrate. Plants in the daisy family mainly store inulin as a carbohydrate reserve, and Jerusalem artichoke, dahlia and yacon do the same. In the human gut it acts as dietary fiber, so food makers add it to yogurts as a prebiotic. It has about 10 percent of the sweetening power of sucrose, and it can be hydrolyzed into fructose, an industrially useful sweetener. In the 21st century, food manufacturers have used it as both a sweetener and a source of fiber. Cultivars grown for inulin derive from root chicory.

  New Zealand is where much of the development of chicory as livestock feed has taken place, even though the plant might have originated in France, Italy and India. Chicory is highly digestible for ruminants and low in fiber. Its roots were once considered an "excellent substitute for oats" for horses, thanks to their protein and fat. A small amount of reduced tannins may help animals use protein more efficiently. Some tannins also reduce intestinal parasites, and farm animals eating chicory have shown lower worm burdens.

  Grasslands Puna, from New Zealand, is grown from Alberta, New Mexico and Florida to Australia. It resists bolting and recovers quickly after grazing. Forage Feast, from France, is cold-hardy and lower in tannins than other forage varieties, so it suits people as well as deer in wildlife plots. Choice was bred for strong winter and early-spring growth and for less lactucin, a compound believed to taint milk.

  In alternative medicine, chicory is listed among the 38 plants used to prepare Bach flower remedies. Ancient Chinese texts on silk production say that the silkworm mother, the main caretaker of the silkworms, should not eat or even touch it.

  German speakers call the plant Blauwarte, roughly a blue lookout by the wayside, and its flower is often seen as an inspiration for the Romantic idea of the Blue Flower. European folklore said that, like springwort and moonwort, chicory could open locked doors. The plant had to be gathered at noon or midnight on St. James's Day, cut with gold, and handled in silence, or the gatherer would die afterward. The last belief on the list is the boldest: that chicory could make its owner invisible, despite flowers that are hard to miss beside any road.

  5924254642