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ARTICHOKES (a la St. Cloud)
Trim and boil them till the chokes come out; them drain and let them cool. Have ready as many small pigeons stewed and well-seasoned as you have artichokes, and stuff each artichoke with a pigeon. Dip them in a good batter made of flour, eggs, a spoonful of oil, and a little salt; fry in a very hot pan with plenty of dripping. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. each.
A Victorian showpiece: whole globe artichokes hollowed out, each filled with a small stewed pigeon, then battered and deep-fried. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how to dress an artichoke, so the gaps are worth filling.
- The hinge: cook the artichokes until the choke lifts out cleanlyEverything depends on this. Boil trimmed globe artichokes 30-40 minutes, until a leaf pulls away with no resistance and the fuzzy choke can be scooped out with a spoon, leaving a cup. Undercooked bottoms will not hollow out, and the second frying is far too brief to finish them.
- Trim more than the recipe says"Trim" here means cutting the stem flush, taking an inch or so off the top, and snipping the thorny leaf tips so the whole thing sits upright and fries evenly. Rub the cut surfaces with lemon or hold them in acidulated water; they brown within minutes.
- Small pigeonsMost likely young domestic pigeon (squab) rather than wild wood-pigeon, which is tougher and gamier and will not soften in a short stew. Stew them until the meat is tender enough to bone out; the recipe wants a whole bird in each artichoke, so unless your artichokes are unusually large you may need to use boned meat instead.
- Season the stew hard"Well-seasoned" is doing real work: the artichoke and the batter are both bland, and the filling is the only source of flavour. Stew the birds in stock with onion, bay, thyme and plenty of salt and pepper, then reduce the cooking liquid to a spoonful or two of glaze and mix it back through the meat so the filling holds together.
- The batterFlour, eggs, a spoonful of oil and salt, with enough liquid to make a coating batter, roughly 4 oz flour, 2 eggs, and milk or water to the thickness of pouring cream. Pat the stuffed artichokes completely dry first or the batter slides off.
- "A very hot pan with plenty of dripping"This is shallow deep-frying in beef dripping. The book gives no temperature; around 350-360F suits a coating batter. Any neutral oil works. Fry two or three minutes until the batter is set and deep gold, turning once; the aim is to crisp the coating, not to cook the contents.
- Cost and yield1s 2d each is per stuffed artichoke, a substantial sum for a single portion and a signal that this was a dinner-party dish rather than family food. One per person, served as a substantial first course or a light main.
Cassell's dictionary belongs to the era when English cookery books catalogued French garnish names as if they were self-explanatory, and "a la St. Cloud" is one of them: named for the town on the Seine west of Paris, site of the imperial chateau destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War. Such labels rarely denote a fixed formula, and the connection to the place is usually decorative rather than documented. What the dish does record accurately is the Victorian appetite for pigeon, then cheap, plentiful and raised in dovecotes and lofts across Britain, and the period's fondness for stuffing one food inside another and frying the result, a habit that runs through the whole entree section of books like this one. The globe artichoke itself was a gentleman's-garden vegetable in Britain, which together with the shilling-and-twopence price tag places this firmly in a household with a cook and a kitchen garden.