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Artichokes
Select some small artichokes, trim them and put in earthenware stewpan containing some hot Crisco. Season with salt and pepper and cover stewpan, leaving to cook for about 10 minutes. Then add for each 1 dozen artichokes, 1 pint canned peas and 1 shredded lettuce. Cover once more and cook gently without moistening, the moisture of lettuce and peas sufficing.
A French braise in disguise: vegetables cooked in fat under a tight lid, with no liquid added at all. Everything depends on that seal.
- Add no waterThe hinge of the dish. The lettuce and peas release enough moisture to steam the artichokes, but only if the lid fits tightly and the heat stays very low. A loose lid or a brisk flame and the pan runs dry and scorches.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and heavily promoted through books like this one; it is hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Use about 3 to 4 tablespoons of butter or olive oil instead, which suits artichokes better.
- Earthenware stewpanA glazed clay pot used directly over the fire, valued for holding gentle even heat. A heavy enameled cast-iron casserole with a close lid is the modern equivalent.
- "Small artichokes"Baby globe artichokes, roughly 2 to 3 inches, whose chokes have not yet developed. Trimming means snapping off the tough outer leaves, cutting an inch or so from the top, and paring the stem; drop them in lemon water as you go or they blacken.
- The ten minutes is shortBaby artichokes generally need 20 to 30 minutes of covered cooking before a knife slides into the base without resistance. Treat the recipe's ten minutes as a first stage only and expect the whole braise to run longer.
- Canned peasA pint, drained, is roughly one standard can. Canned peas of the period were already fully cooked and soft. Frozen peas are the better modern choice, but add them only in the last five minutes or they turn to paste.
- The lettuceShredded romaine or butter lettuce, which collapses to almost nothing and functions as the liquid in the pan. Do not substitute a watery iceberg, which weeps rather than braises.
- YieldA dozen baby artichokes with the peas serves four as a vegetable course, or two as a light supper with bread.
This is petits pois à la française — peas smothered with shredded lettuce and fat in a sealed pot — with artichokes worked in, a technique the French call cooking à l'étuvée, in the vegetables' own moisture. The method belongs to the era of the slow coal range and the earthenware pot, where a covered dish could sit at the back of the stove untended. The book itself is one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks written for Procter & Gamble in the years after the product's 1911 launch; recipes of this type were adapted from standard French domestic cookery with the shortening substituted for butter throughout, part of a sustained campaign to persuade American cooks that a vegetable fat could do anything an animal one could.