Surprise Royal Visit

The hungry gap is coming to an end.  Soon there will be new potatoes, peas, lettuces and broad beans to add to the rhubarb already harvesting.  One crop that has taken me by surprise and jumped ahead of the rest seemingly out of nowhere is the flashy globe artichoke.  How could I have forgotten how early this crops?  I am following advice and removing the first heads to encourage the rest to grow to edible size.  Its proper name is Cynara scolymus and it is an edible thistle, but only edible if you pick it before it flowers.  Even then, only a very small portion of the flower bud  is edible and it is not easy to extract from the top of the stem, behind the immature flower. Additional  scrapings can be garnered from the base of each ‘petal’ (or more correctly  bract).  So little of the plant is edible that you wonder how this vegetable found advocates willing to grow it when food was scarce. But it did find advocates, wealthy and influential ones.  If any vegetable is to be called the vegetable of monarchs then this is it.  Exotic, ostentatious, expensive, status affirming. Henry VIII reputedly loved them (As did French,  Spanish and Italian aristocracy way back to the not so royal Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil)  When Henry’s sister Mary, Queen of France, got married in 1515 the commemorative picture showed her holding a globe artichoke. As with all scarce exotic fruit and vegetables it was said to be an aphrodisiac.