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Artichoke Bottoms, Stewed
Dried artichoke bottoms should be soaked for two or three hours in warm water, then boiled in salt and water, and served with white sauce poured over them; or stewed in gravy flavoured with ketchup, salt, and pepper, and thickened with flour. Time to boil, three-quarters of an hour.
A two-line Victorian entry that assumes you keep dried artichoke bottoms in the store cupboard. The substitutions matter more than the method here.
- Dried artichoke bottomsThese were whole fonds, trimmed of leaves and choke, dried hard for winter keeping and sold by grocers and Italian warehousemen. They have effectively vanished from retail; jarred, canned or frozen artichoke bottoms are the practical stand-in, and they need no soaking at all.
- Adjust the timing to what you actually haveThree-quarters of an hour applies to a rehydrated dried bottom, which is dense and leathery. Frozen bottoms want 8-10 minutes in simmering salted water, jarred or canned ones only need warming through in the sauce. Fresh trimmed bottoms take 20-25 minutes and are done when a knife slides in without resistance.
- "Ketchup" is not tomatoIn a book of this date ketchup means mushroom or walnut ketchup, a thin, dark, salty condiment closer to a mushroom-heavy Worcestershire than to anything sweet. Mushroom ketchup is still made; a splash of soy plus a little Worcestershire gives a similar savoury depth if you have none.
- "Gravy" means stockVictorian gravy in this sense is generally a strong brown meat stock, not the flour-thickened pan sauce of a Sunday roast. Use a well-reduced beef or veal stock; the flour thickening the recipe calls for goes into the stew.
- The white sauceRead this as a plain white sauce, milk- or stock-based, about the consistency of pouring cream. Season it firmly, and add lemon juice at the last moment if you want it sharper.
- Keeping them paleCut artichoke browns fast. Hold trimmed or soaked bottoms in water with lemon juice or a spoonful of vinegar until they go into the pan, and cook them in a non-reactive pot so the flesh does not grey.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Reckon on two to three bottoms per person as a vegetable course or garnish, with about 150 ml of sauce for every four bottoms.
Artichoke bottoms were one of the great winter luxuries of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century larder, dried or bottled precisely because the fresh globe artichoke has a short season and travels badly. Two finishes are offered here: the white treatment, with a white sauce; the brown treatment, stewed in meat gravy sharpened with mushroom ketchup. Mushroom ketchup was often said to be a mainstay seasoning of the period, providing the savoury depth cooks now reach for in stock cubes or soy, and its appearance in a vegetable stew is a good marker of how thoroughly the Victorian kitchen leaned on meat-derived flavour even in the dishes we would think of as sides.