I don’t remember exactly when I first ate artichokes, but I know for certain that in our earliest encounters they arrived floating in a golden liquid flecked with green, the whites of their hearts pressed against the glass of a squat little jar like specimens in a biology lab. These buttery, tender morsels dripped with oil and vinegar, making a pizza or salad tangy and, I thought, vaguely Italian. If you had asked me at the time, I don’t think I could have described an artichoke in its natural form.

All that changed one spring that I happen to remember very well. I was in my mid-20s, a small-town refugee working at my first real job and living happily in a falling-down house in Little Italy, a three-storey semi so dilapidated it seemed to be slowly easing itself onto the sidewalk. It was March and the hopeful glint of the early spring sun had brought a man into my life who rode a red bicycle and winked at me. Our courtship evolved slowly, warming up as the city extricated itself from the grip of a long, cold winter. We took lazy bike rides in a still-barren High Park and ate brunch in tiny cafés where sunlight burnished the graffiti-scarred tables. I remember thinking the nubbly woollen hat and mittens his mother had given him were both endearing (he loves his mom!) and improbably cool—in the effortless way of someone who is comfortable in his skin.

It was May when I finally asked him up for dinner at my third-floor apartment. He came bearing what looked like four plump green pine cones. Taking off his coat, he held his offering up triumphantly, like a bagged beast, and I could see they had narrow stems at the base, and an overlapping armour-like exterior, fierce-looking with a silvery lustre. “Artichokes,” he said with relish.

The green globe artichoke (not to be confused with the jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke, that crisp tuber turning up on more and more local menus) is a thistle-like vegetable with roots in the Mediterranean and a history intertwined with that of the cardoon. Which of the similar-looking plants came first is actually the source of raging debate among scientists and food historians. With such contentious beginnings, perhaps it’s not surprising that the artichoke has been at the centre of historical controversy, too. Florentine Catherine de’ Medici, for instance, is known to have scandalized France’s royal court with her penchant for Cynara scolymus, which had a reputation as an aphrodisiac. And once ensconced in the New World, the artichoke inspired a war of sorts: a New York mobster known as the Artichoke King went head to head with wholesalers and police to protect his distribution monopoly. In 1935, fed up with the gangster’s threats and intimidation—not to mention his alleged corrupting of at least one New York City judge—Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia proclaimed a city-wide ban on selling, displaying or even possessing the vegetable. But the modern reference I like best is Nobel Prize–winning poet Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Artichoke,” an oddly sensuous tribute to the spiky veg.

Back in my little apartment, however, I knew none of this, and uncertain about how to prepare what looked to me like something out of Dr. Seuss, I handed the kitchen over to my dinner guest. His approach was simple. He lopped off the stems close to the base, popped the bulbs in a pot with a few inches of water, a lemon wedge and a garlic clove, then poured us each a glass of wine.