This is the time of year when I crave Autumn’s bitter greens. People in the know call bitters a liver tonic. Every culture seems to have a “bitter” and sadly, coffee appears to be America’s bitter of choice. Now I LOVE coffee and you can even drink chicory (endive) coffee…but there is more good bitterness out there to choose from. I take mine in salad greens too.

The escarole and treviso I planted this summer are still going strong in the garden. I have so much escarole, in fact, that I’ve taken out the cookbooks for inspiration and learned a bit about the endive family in the process.

Called “scarola” in Italy, the chicory genus or cichorium intybus, are a family of bitter leaved greens used raw or cooked. Part of the daisy family, they have been around since the days of the Greco-Roman empire. Today, China and the US are the world’s largest producers. The creamy white Belgian endives, or Witloof we’ve long seen in the stores are actually the sprout from a chicory root and tricky to grow here in Maine, though I have succeeded. Here’s how it works. What one does is grow a large root, then cellar it over winter to get the blanched sprout.

But why stay with what we know when there is such a large family to get acquainted with. There is the lovely white Tardivo, available in the winter months, the rather common but tasty reddish Radicchio di Chioggia, it’s cos-like cousin, Treviso and the curly endive we know as frisee, or chicoree frisee in French, also known as varcrispum. Did you know that certain Italian endive varieties must be grown in particular regions to retain their names, like good wine?

The variety of Batavian endive or escarole I have growing now is the broad leaved style with an appealing creamy white center (var latifolia).

We can find endive and escarole in dishes from Spain, France and Italy. Italian “wedding soup” is a fine example of the happy combination of bitter greens, pasta, meatballs and rich chicken stock. Spanish Xato is a Catalan sauce of almonds and hazelnuts, bread crumbs, vinegar, garlic, anchovy, oil and seasonings MADE for dressing bitter salad greens. The French have had a long love affair with braised endives, which I learned to love in Burgundy.

Here are a few delicious examples:

Wilted Greens (using escarole)
Several slices of bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled (save the drippings)
2 Tablespoons of drippings
¼ cup mild vinegar
1 teaspoon chopped parsley
1 teaspoon grated onion
1 teaspoon sugar, optional

Mix together and add the bacon. Set aside and keep warm. Have ready one large head of escarole, cleaned and dried, torn into bite sized pieces.

Toss the greens and warm dressing, season with salt and pepper and serve at once. Makes an unusual first course. My Pennsylvania Dutch grandma made this dish with dandelion greens but any bitter green will do nicely.

Serves 4.

Salad of Curly Endive and Poached Egg (or Farmer’s Salad)
2 large heads of frisee, washed, dried and separated
2 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled, reserve the fat

Make a dressing:
1 Tablespoon red wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 clove garlic, minced
Salt and pepper
Mix all together then whisk in: 1½ Tablespoons bacon fat and 2½ Tablespoons olive oil

Poach your eggs:
Using a heavy pan, fill with a quart of water with 2 Tablespoons white vinegar. Heat to a simmer and slide in four eggs. Poach for 3-4 minutes and remove with a slotted spoon.

Keep eggs warm while you toss the greens with the dressing in a large bowl. Taste for salt and pepper, add the bacon and toss again. Divide into individual portions and top with the poached egg. The fun is in breaking the poached egg into the salad and mixing it in…delicious with croutons too.

Serves 4.

Braised Belgian Endive
These are meltingly good with roasts or baked fish.

4 large Belgian endives, trimmed. Remove any discolored outer leaves. Cut in half the long way and salt them.
2 TB butter, melted in a heavy bottomed pot.

Add the endive, cut side down, and cook over medium heat until nicely browned. If you are feeding a larger group, brown the endives in batches using extra butter and use a larger baking dish.

Placed endives in a baking dish, browned side up. Keep them in one layer.

Add 1 cup chicken broth (should be ½ inch deep in the baking dish), cover tightly and bake at 400° for about 20 minutes or until they test done.

A nice variation on this recipe is to bake those braised endives in a nice Bechemel Sauce with a bit of nutmeg, cheese and bread crumb. Works well with heavy cream too, if you are not counting calories.

Serves 4.

SO, get into the kitchen and turn on the oven, it’s cold out there….

Laura Cabot is an MF&L columnist and blogger, a French trained chef with a long career as a chef/restaurant owner, and president of Laura Cabot Catering in Waldoboro.