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Artichoke Salad
Wash thoroughly and quarter some very young artichokes. Remove the chokes, and eat them like radishes, with pepper, salt, vinegar, and oil. They taste like nuts, and make a nice relish. Time to prepare, ten minutes. Probable cost, 2d. or 3d. each.
This is barely a recipe and entirely a technique: raw baby artichokes dressed at the table. It only works if the artichokes are genuinely immature, so the shopping matters more than the method.
- "Very young" is not optionalLook for baby artichokes about the size of an egg, ideally with the stem still attached and the leaves tight. A full-sized globe artichoke is fibrous and unpleasantly astringent raw, and its choke is a mass of inedible bristles rather than the soft, undeveloped fuzz of an immature head.
- What to strip awaySnap off the tough outer leaves until you reach the pale green ones, trim the top third, and peel the stem. On true babies there is often no choke to speak of; if there is a fuzzy centre, scrape it out with the tip of a teaspoon.
- Acidulated waterCut artichoke browns within a minute or two. Keep a bowl of water with the juice of a lemon beside you and drop the quarters in as you go, then drain and pat dry before dressing so the oil will cling.
- Dressing proportionsThe original leaves it to the eater. Three parts good olive oil to one part wine vinegar, with salt and coarse black pepper, is the usual ratio; shave a little Parmesan over the top if you want it to read as a modern salad rather than a relish.
- Slice thin if serving as a saladQuarters are fine for dipping "like radishes" as a pre-dinner nibble. If it is going on a plate with a fork, slice the trimmed hearts as thinly as you can manage, ideally on a mandoline, which softens the texture considerably.
- Cost and yieldThe original prices them at 2d. or 3d. each, which suggests they were a seasonal shop item rather than a luxury. Reckon two or three baby artichokes per person as a first course or appetiser; dress them just before serving, as they will not sit well once dressed.
The globe artichoke is a cultivated thistle, developed around the Mediterranean and grown seriously in Italy and southern France by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from where it reached English gardens as a fashionable vegetable. Eating it raw, which strikes many cooks as odd, is standard practice in the Italian regions that grow it: young hearts sliced thin with oil, lemon and salt remain a spring fixture in Rome and around Venice. The entry is really a piece of instruction about ingredients ritain most often met the vegetable boiled and served with melted butter, but it has another life entirely if picked young enough. The comparison to radishes and the phrase "nice relish" tell you how it was meant to appear: not as a course but as something set on the table to be picked at, in the manner of celery or olives.