Botanical description
Common chicory is the type species of the genus. Botanical illustration from O. W. Thome's book Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz, 1885
It has a long, strong tap root that penetrates deep into the soil.
In the first year, a rosette of bright oblong leaves with a distinct main vein appears. The leaves can be rounded at the end or narrowed. Rigid vertical recessed stem appears in the second summer.
The flowers are reed, large, bisexual, often blue, less often pinkish or white, located on a short individual stalk extending from the top of the leaf. The flowers are in baskets with a double wrapper, the outer leaflets of the wrapper are short, recurved, the inner ones are upright. The flowers open sequentially upwards, although they are often closed in cloudy weather.
The fruit is indistinctly pentagonal with a tuft of short scales.
pplication
Two types of chicory are cultivated - chicory salad and chicory ordinary. At the peak of the season, dried chicory root contains 75% inulin [4] (according to other sources, about 49% [5]).
The root is used as a coffee substitute. Dried and roasted roots are added to natural coffee to improve its taste. According to Alexandre Dumas, the continental blockade, which deprived France of both coffee and sugar, contributed to the spread of chicory as a raw material for a drink. To make the sharply risen in price of coffee more affordable and to improve the taste of the drink, which then seemed too bitter without sugar, chefs began to add crushed chicory to coffee. It was in this form that a relatively inexpensive, in comparison with pure coffee, drink became widespread in Europe starting in the 1810s [6]. Chicory is also an ingredient in fruit teas[7].
The leaves of cultivated species are used for various salads and as garnishes for dishes. Dumas, in his Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (French: Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine; published posthumously in 1873), wrote of wild chicory:
It is one of the most valuable salad plants and makes very healthy and very nutritious salads, perhaps the best of all, although they are slightly bitter. Doctors sometimes allow convalescents to eat only one salad, and that is chicory salad.
It is a honey plant and a pollen plant [en].
