Cultivated, it's most often used as a salad leaf. There are 3 varieties: radicchio, sugarloaf and Belgian endive. Radicchio is recognisable by the white veins and red leaves, it's quite bitter. Sugarloaf looks like a traditional cos lettuce and the Belgian endive is the more familiar creamy white variety with the pale yellow tips. It can be eaten raw but is often stuffed or baked. This unassuming vegetable has a wide range of health benefits, from easing digestive problems and preventing infections and heartburn to protecting against kidney stones and heart disease. You can tick off quite a vitamin and mineral checklist too: it's full of A, B6, C, E and K and is a source of zinc, magnesium, iron folic acid and potassium. The root of the chicory is also used as a coffee substitute when dried and ground. When this practice was adopted is not clear but there are references to this use of chicory in colonial America in the early 1800s. As a caffeine free alternative to coffee, it grew in popularity and spread to Europe. Such a powerful natural product, it's lucky it tastes good!
Find out more about the health benefits of chicory here.