>> Something I've seen on sale in Istanbul a couple of times:
>> bundles of green stems about a foot long with slightly hairy
>> skin. You peel the skin off and chew them. They taste like
>> rather woody raw rhubarb. According to one person I spoke
> "The name of the fruit you're looking for is 'ýþkýn', otherwise known as
> 'kenger'. It's also called 'kenger ýþkýný'. It grows in the mountains. It's
> found only rarely in a few places in Istanbul."
> 'Iþkýn' means 'tendril'; 'kenger' is 'cardoon' (Cynara cardunculus). So
> 'kenger ýþkýný' means 'cardoon tendrils'.

Yikes, I would *never* have guessed that.

I once lived in a shared house in Leith (north Edinburgh) with an
allotment. The allotment was dank, boggy ground next to a cemetery
and only mud-loving vegetables would grow there. The allotment owner
tried cardoons one year and they grew like Triffids. They are in the
thistle/artichoke family - imagine a thistle with stems like a giant
celery plant three or four feet high, each stem edged with razor-sharp
thorns. I looked up the technique for harvesting them in an Italian
food book - it wasn't so much harvesting as trapping. Two people
quietly approached the cardoon holding a few feet of strong rope,
which you wound round the plant to pinion its stems into a bundle.
You could then sever the struggling immobilized cardoon at its base
with a machete.

To cook it, you sliced the spines off (handling the cardoon with two
pairs of heavy gardening gloves) and boiled the stems in salt water,
changing the water to remove the bitter alkaloid content. After a
gallon or two of salt water, they still tasted like something a
starving goat would give the go-by.

The trick must be to harvest them very young.

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