According to an Aegean legend and praised in song by the poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the first artichoke was a lovely young girl who lived on the island of Zinari. The god, Zenus, who was jealour of her beauty, hurtled a thunderbolt towards Earth and transformed the recently elevated Goddess Cynara into an artichoke.

It origin dates back to the time of the Greek philosopher and naturalist, Theophrastus (371-287 B.C.), who wrote of them being grown in Italy and Sicily.

Dioscordes, a Greek physician, wrote about them at the time of Christ. Ancient Greeks and Romans considered artichokes a delicacy and an aphrodistiac. In Ancient Greece, the artichoke was attributed to being effective in securing the birth of boys.

In 77 A.D., the Roman naturalist Pliny called the choke one of the earth’s monstrosities. Evidently he and his colleagues continued to enjoy eating them. One reads that wealthy Romans enjoyed artichokes prepared in honey and vinegar, seasoned with cumin, so that the treat would be available year round.

Beginning about 800 A.D., North African Moors begin cultivating artichokes in the area of Granada, Spain, and another Arab group, the Saracens, became identified with chokes in Sicily. This may explain why the English word artichoke is derived from the Arab, al’qarshuf rather than from the Latin, cynara. It is likely that artichokes moved up the Italian boot into Tuscany at some point unknown. Between 800 and 1500, it’s probable that the artichoke was improved and transformed, perhaps in monastery gardens, into the plant we would recognize today.

Artichokes were first cultivated at Naples around the middle of the 15th century and gradually spread to other sections of Europe. After Rome fell, artichokes became scarce but re-emerged during the Renaissance in 1466 when the Strozzi family brought them from Florence to Naples.

1576 - In the 16th century, Catherine de Medici, married to King Henry II of France at the age of 14, is credited with making artichokes famous. She is said to have introduced them to France when she married King Henry II in the mid 16th century. The chronicler, Pierre de L'Estoile, in his Journal of June 19, 1576 talks about the occasion of the wedding of Marquis de Lomenie and Mlle de Martigues, The Queen Mother ate so much she thought she would die, and was very ill with diarrhoea. They said it was from eating too many artichoke bottoms and the combs and kidney of cockerels, of which she was very fond.

From the Book of Nature, by Dr. Bartolomeo Boldo in 1576, it has the virtue of . . . provoking Venus for both men and women; for women making them more desirable, and helping the men who are in these matters rather tardy.

1695 - The French explorer Samuel de Champlain, discoverd them being grown by the Indians in the Cape Cod area.

In The British Physician by Robert Turner, they (artichokes) do mightily stir up lust by increasing seed, and therefore are good for married persons who are weak in the act of generation.

1800s - French immigrants brought artichokes to the United States in 1806 when they settled in the Louisiana Territory. But though the first commercial artichoke fields were developed in Louisiana, by 1940 they had mysteriously disappeared.

They were later established in Louisiana by French colonists and in California in the Monterey area by the Spaniards during the later 1800s.

20th century - In 1922 Andrew Molera, a landowner in the Salinas Valley of Monterey County, California, just south of San Francisco, decided to lease land previously dedicated to the growing of sugar beets to farmers willing to try the new vegetable.

SOURCES:

Cynara Erotica, by A. C. Castelli, published by A.C. Castelli Associates, New York, NY.