FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
BURDOCK, BUTTER-BUR, BEGGAR'S BUTTONS
Ward, Artemas. 1923. The Encyclopedia of Food. New York, Number Fifty, Union Square.
is a weed in this country but much cultivated in Japan, where it has been developed into an excellent root-vegetable. The roots are dug when from two to three months old, before they have begun to branch or become woody.
Excerpts from Hawkes, Alex D. 1968. A World of Vegetable Cookery. Simon and Schuster, New York.
The Burdock (Arctium Lappa, of the Daisy Family) is very well known to everyone in most temperatre parts of this country-as an all too common and dispeased weed. Anyone who has ever spent an hour or two picking off its wickedly sharp pickled burs will never forget it.
But this objectionable plant also figures prominently in the great cuisines of the Orient, the huge roots being made into a much favored vegetable condiment. The roots, measuring as much as four feet in length, have a brown to grayish skin and white flesh, this coarse and fibrous. Usually a biennial, with large, broad, vaguely heart-shaped leaves on elongate stalks, the Burdock is cultivated as an annual in Hawaii. It is most frequently encounted under its Japanese name, gobo, but sometimes under its chinese label, ngau-pong.
Excerpted from Montagne, Prosper. 1961. Larousee Gastronomique. The Encyclopedia of Food, Wine & Cookery. Crown Publishers, Inc., New York.
is a hardy perennial plant which grows along paths on the roadside and in the hedgerows. It is also called herbe aux teigneux (scurvy grass) because in the past its leaves were used as poultices for certain kinds of sores.
In Scotland young shoots and peeled roots of burdock are used in cooking; they are prepared as salsify.
