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Mothers like to boast when their children eat vegetables, especially vegetables that are a bit off the beaten garden path. So I was quick to report, those many years ago, that my children loved eating artichokes.
What's not to like about an artichoke? You get to pull those leaves off one at a time and scrape the pulp from the base of the leaf with your teeth. Nowadays I enjoy that pulp for its own sake. But when the children were young I served our artichokes with little dishes of melted butter, one dish per person, and we dipped the base of each leaf into melted butter before eating it, which probably went a long way toward explaining their love of artichokes.
Eating artichokes is a lengthy affair. One leaf at a time we whittled down the big thistles, piling the scraped leaves into a bowl. (Sidebar: do not ever put artichoke leaves into your garbage disposal. My sister Sari did that once. The repairman who came to fix the mess said, when she told him the problem, "Oh, NO, Mrs. A-dair. Don't ever put artichoke leaves in the disposal! Oh, NO!" It took him hours to fix her mistake.)
After much eating of leaves, we inevitably reached the heart of the artichoke, so carefully protected by the hairy, feathery, inedible choke. It was my job as mother to cut out the choke for each child, leaving the smooth inverted dome of the heart, ready for eating. My son, the youngest of the three, however, liked only the business of plucking and eating the leaves, butter-drenched as they were. He said he didn't like the heart!
Some families might have auctioned that extra artichoke heart off to the highest bidder—the one who promised the best behaviour, say. Or some families might have allotted the extra heart to the parent who had patiently cut out the chokes from all four artichokes. But in our family I carefully divided the unwanted heart into three equal pieces and let my daughters have the first two picks. This meant that, if I had not sectioned that heart carefully enough, I would end up with the smallest piece. I was not a self-sacrificing mother when it came to eating artichoke hearts, so those three pieces were absolutely equal in size. I made sure I got my full share.
And we thanked the baby of the family, the son and brother, exuberantly as each of us plunged our extra mouthful of artichoke heart into the dregs of our melted butter.
The next day at work I would annoy my co-workers by bragging that MY children were just crazy about artichokes. Ah, the petty triumphs of parenting . . .
Copyright 2010 Ann Tudor
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