Kitchen Garden

PUNTARELLE

A year ago, at a Bologna market, I came across a vegetable I had not seen before.

Called a puntarelle, it's a type of chicory with long dandelion-like leaves and an apparently tasty white bulbous centre. I bought some seed from Italian suppliers Franchi and made a sowing in early spring in the greenhouse, planting out in May. By midsummer, the plants were showing white tendrils which had begun to curl and swell, and by the end of July they had grown above the leaves and were resembling the head of Medusa. Clearly the puntarelle had bolted, and soon afterwards blue flowers appeared.

So I tried again, sowing more seed directly into the ground in the

hope of a late-autumn crop. By now I had read that puntarelle are in season in Italy during winter, and especially popular in Rome. Asparagus chicory is the name by which this vegetable is known in Britain and the US; I had never come across it here.

At the time of writing (November), a few shoots within the plant are beginning to look like the illustration on the seed packet, but I rather doubt if we shall get enough crisp white tendrils, hollow in the middle, to make the traditional Roman salad. However, we can eat the leaves, first soaked in water to remove some of their bitter taste, before being cooked like any other green vegetable. Having got my timings wrong this year, I think I shall try sowing the seed in late June and hope for greater success.

More satisfying results have been achieved in the past year in my kitchen garden with yellow beetroot, peas (many more than last year), shallots, kohlrabi and rocket and coriander (both from late sowings). Yellow courgettes gave the largest and longest crop, with a few growing so rapidly that they escaped my attention and turned into marrows. Two of them are still hanging up in onion bags, awaiting a refreshing soup after the over-indulgence of Christmas.