The Artistry of the Artichoke
A bewitching, challenging vegetable gets its close up.
Welcome to a post for all subscribers, a photo essay about the strange and magical artichoke. Next Tuesday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for Texas sheet cake. As always, check out my past posts here and learn more about my day job here. Thanks for reading!
It’s now summer in Chicago (finally!) and with summer comes one of my favorite things in the world: an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables to explore through my camera lens. Some of you may remember my summertime photo foraging from years past. Rest assured, a photo essay of foraged photos from around the neighborhood is coming, along with a potential to meet up and photo forage together later this summer (are you interested in that?!).
This spring, I spent a lot of time focusing on taking photos for the sake of taking photos. It’s my favorite way to get out of a mental rut, and by this point in my career, I can feel a rut coming on the way I can feel a cold: it starts slowly and creeps in on the edges of my vision, pulling me down into exhaustion and making me wish I worked a 9-5 for a soulless corporation.
The cure for this, as I know well by now, lies in hiring my most fickle client: myself. I take myself to the grocery store, wander aimlessly, and find something—anything—to take home and photograph. One day this spring, that something was a purple artichoke.
Artichokes have always fascinated me in a reverent sort of way. At one of my first freelance roles, I attended an incredibly fancy tasting menu showcase with my client. I had never eaten an artichoke before, so when one appeared on gorgeously prepared plate in front of me, I didn’t know what to do. I looked at Colin and he looked back at me, and we both sort of mentally shrugged and dug in. For the next twenty minutes, we probably looked like cows chewing our cud. We’ve come a long way since then, but I still haven’t quite nailed cooking artichokes at home. If anyone out there has suggestions, I’m all ears.
But though I don’t know how to cook them and still feel slightly intimidated by this dinosaur-looking flowery vegetable, I can still appreciate the artistry of the artichoke. The petals are bewitching to me, laid out in their perfect pattern. The almost sensual heart of the artichoke, hidden inside, makes me wonder what a cross-section of a cave might look like.
I wanted to shoot the artichoke in stages as I prepared it to cook. One of the things that fascinates me most about artichokes is how high maintenance and complicated they are, how much of the vegetable gets peeled away and discarded to get to the tender center. There’s a metaphor there, I’m sure of it. But for now, enjoy these photos of the purple artichoke and let me know how you cook them below!
See you back here on Tuesday for Texas sheet cake! Thanks for reading Page & Plate.
You’re supposed to eat an artichoke like an apple, no?