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ARTICHOKES (a la Lyonnaise)
Wash, blanch, and trim four artichokes; then place them in a stewpan with two ounces of butter, the juice of a lemon, a pinch of salt, and a pinch of pepper. Simmer them gently until they are sufficiently cooked, then drain them from the fat, and put them into the oven to brown slightly. Put a cupful of good stock into the saucepan in which the artichokes were stewed. Stir gently for a few minutes, add a glass of white wine, and serve. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. each. Sufficient for three persons.
A straightforward braise of whole globe artichokes, finished with a pan sauce. The original assumes you know how to prepare the vegetable, which is where most of the work lies.
- Choose and trim firstThese are globe artichokes, not Jerusalem artichokes. Snap off the tough outer leaves, cut an inch or so from the tops, trim the stem, and rub every cut surface with lemon; blanching means 5 to 8 minutes in acidulated boiling water, which sets the colour and softens them for the braise.
- The chokeThe recipe says nothing about removing the fuzzy centre, so the heads may well have gone to table whole for diners to deal with. If you want them ready to eat, spread the leaves after blanching and scoop out the choke with a teaspoon before they go into the butter.
- Stewpan and heatA stewpan is a wide, heavy saucepan with a lid. Two ounces of butter with only lemon juice for liquid will scorch over anything but the lowest flame, so keep it covered and check that it is barely bubbling.
- How long is "sufficiently cooked"Reckon 25 to 35 minutes for medium heads. They are done when the base takes a knife tip without resistance and an inner leaf pulls away cleanly. The stated three-quarters of an hour is presumably meant to cover the whole operation rather than the braising alone, though it is tight if you blanch and brown generously.
- Browning in the ovenThe book asks only that they brown slightly, so hot and brief is what is wanted: a hot oven, in the region of 425F, for something like 8 to 10 minutes until the leaf tips colour. A longer, cooler stay will only dry them out.
- A glass of wineA Victorian wineglass is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, though "a glass" here is loose and 4 fl oz of dry white is a defensible reading. A cupful of stock is about 8 fl oz. Note that the recipe adds the wine at the very end and serves immediately, so any reducing you do to thicken the sauce is a departure from the text.
- Deglaze while the pan is warmThe buttery lemon residue in the stewpan is the whole point of the sauce. Add the stock while the pan is still hot and scrape the base as it comes to a simmer.
- Yield and costFour artichokes for three people. The pence-per-head pricing is Victorian British currency and is only of historical interest.
The globe artichoke had been grown in English kitchen gardens since the Tudor period but remained a comparatively genteel vegetable in the nineteenth century, priced by the head rather than by the pound, which is why the book quotes 2d. to 4d. each. The label a la Lyonnaise is worth a raised eyebrow: in most Victorian and later kitchen French it signals onions, and none appear here, so the name is best read as a general nod to Lyon and its butter-rich cooking rather than a precise classification. Braising a blanched vegetable in butter and acid, then browning it and building a sauce from the pan, is the standard French sequence such dictionaries were teaching English households to adopt.