Endive
Cichorium endivia
A low, spreading rosette grown for its bitter salad leaves, in two familiar forms: the finely cut, frizzy frisée and the broad, wavy-margined escarole. Broken leaves bleed a milky latex and taste sharply bitter, mellowing towards the pale, blanched heart. Grown as an annual and cut before it runs to flower.
A Mediterranean cultigen of gardens, allotments and market beds, wanting fertile, moisture-retentive soil and full sun. It does not persist in the wild in Britain and Ireland, where escapes are casual and short-lived.
No recorded eating toxicity; the bitterness comes from sesquiterpene lactones in the latex, which can provoke contact dermatitis in people already sensitised to the daisy family. Plants grown along allotment edges or verges may carry spray residues, so wash the leaves before use.
Always use more than one reference to confirm a plant. You are responsible for what you choose to forage.
Habit
A flat to loosely domed rosette 20–35 cm across, sitting close to the ground with no basal woody stock. Plants that have bolted throw up a branched flowering stem and the leaves turn tough and much more bitter.
Leaves
Two clearly different forms sold under the same name: frisée has narrow, deeply cut and curled leaves with fringed margins, escarole has broad, flat to wavy leaves with a pale midrib. Both are smooth rather than bristly, unlike the roughly hairy basal leaves of wild chicory.
Flowerheads
On bolting plants, all-ligulate heads 2–4 cm across in pale blue to lilac, opening in the morning and closing by afternoon. Wild chicory (Cichorium intybus) carries similar but brighter blue heads on wiry, sparsely leaved stems, so use the leaf rosette to tell them apart rather than the flower.
Latex
Break a leaf stalk or the stem and a white milky sap appears within seconds, bitter to the tongue. Cultivated lettuce also bleeds latex, so this confirms the daisy family rather than the species and should be read alongside leaf shape.
Updated 2026-08-08T11:01:33.872Z · Part of the shared Foragers Log catalogue · Vegetable