CHICORY

CHICORY FLOWERS

Thursday,   8:30 AM.  64 degrees F at the ferry dock, 59 on the back porch.  It was 55 there an hour ago.   The sky is mostly cloudy with some haze, the humidity is 86%, and the barometer is falling, now at 29.97".  It looks like we will have a rainy Friday.
   Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing.  I was only eight years old at the time but I remember it well, as my mother and I were shopping on Milwaukee's South Side when the news broke.  I remember my mother bursting into tears, sobbing, "Oh, those poor people!"  I was rather mystified at her response, as we had just come from my aunt's house, where two young male cousins were not at home because they were in the South Pacific, fighting  their way towards what was sure to be a deadly, costly invasion of Japan, from which they might not return.  And that's the way it remains today; a conflicted tragedy, of which it continues to be agonizing to analyze the necessity or morality.
   Chicory, Chicorium intybus, in the Sunflower  (Compositae) family, is one of my favorite roadside weeds, as it is one of only a very few truly blue roadside flowers of summer. It is naturalized almost everywhere in temperate North America. It thrives along sterile roadsides where little else will grow. Unfortunately, it flowers just about the time all the roadsides get mowed, and also,  I don’t see as much of it north as further south in Wisconsin.  It is of European and Middle-eastern  origin, where it is (or at least was) much used as a winter salad, the roots dug up, potted and grown indoors and deprived of light, producing tender, blanched leaves.
   The roasted and ground roots have long been added to coffee, both in Europe and in  the US South, and commercial mixtures of coffee and chicory are, I believe, still available. I have tried it over the years with mixed reviews and will try it again if I can find it in the store.  Chicory's usual habitat, on the absolute edge of the road, makes it difficult to dig and not very appetizing.   It imparts a slightly bitter flavor to coffee but makes it less acid.  Chicory also was used in the treatment of tuberculosis in the past, before antibiotics.  Its English common name is the very descriptive "blue sailors," and the name Chicory is derived from the Arabic name for the plant.
  Chicory and its selected varieties (of which endive is one) have many culinary uses in European and Middle Eastern cuisine, and it is a forage plant for cattle in many countries.  It is a highly useful plant, which we Americans virtually ignore and remain mostly ignorant of.