Judge a radicchio by its cover, and you’ll find it to be pretty in pink, red, purple, yellow, white… But this beaut, beyond helping us eat the rainbow in the notoriously dreary cold seasons, contributes a bold bitterness to a number of preparations favored across the boot: raw in salads, sliced thin and stirred into risottos or soups, grilled, roasted, cooked up into a pasta sugo, added to panini and pizzas.

For us Italians, its assertiveness–in both looks and flavor–is the perfect cure for dreary winter-weather cooking. With soft, papery leaves bolstered by fibrous, crunchy ribs, radicchio is a member of the chicory family–its brethren include endive, escarole, and puntarelle–and begins to appear in mercati around late November.