Pain de sucre chicory

We had a monster arrive in our organic veg box this week; it looked like a massive head of Chinese leaves… except it wasn’t, the leaves were too fragile, then I thought it might be a weird cabbage or lettuce… but it wasn’t… I gave up and looked at the notes that Riverford organics always send us… and it was a type of chicory, Pain de Sucre, Sugarloaf.

I wonder if children these days know what a sugarloaf is? I expect some of them might have come across mountains called Sugarloaf Mountain but do they know where the term comes from? When I was young we used to go to the Cambridge Folk Museum, and one of the exhibits was a sugarloaf, a massive cone of hard set sugar that had to be attacked with a little hammer or tough little scissors called nippers to knock bits off.

Apparently cones of sugar date back to the fifteenth century in England, and re much older in other countries in the East. I guess it was a convenient way to carry and store the product. It was only in the nineteenth century that sugar technology evolved to produce cube sugar, granulated sugar and more refined products.

Back to my sugarloaf chicory… I had a lovely Turkish recipe for stuffed vine leaves, it mentioned that cabbage leaves could be used instead and so I tried my massive chicory leaves…