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ARTICHOKES (a l'Italienne)
Well wash, trim, and quarter the artichokes, and boil them in salt and water until tender. Remove the chokes, drain thoroughly, and arrange them on a dish with the leaves outwards, and intersperse them with watercress. Pour good white sauce flavoured with stewed mushrooms, over them. Time to boil the artichokes, half an hour. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. each. Allow one artichoke for each person.
A straightforward Victorian treatment of globe artichokes: boiled, dressed cold-ish on a platter, and sauced. Two things need attention — the boiling time and what "good white sauce" was assumed to mean.
- Which artichokeThese are globe artichokes, not Jerusalem artichokes, which are a different plant entirely. Look for heads that feel heavy and squeak slightly when squeezed.
- Cut orderThe recipe boils first and removes the chokes afterwards; quartering at the outset at least makes the choke easy to scoop out of the cooked pieces. Trim the stem, snap off the toughest outer leaves and slice off the top inch of spines.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour suits whole large heads; quarters are tender in 12 to 18 minutes. Test the base of a quarter with a knife tip — it should meet no resistance.
- Keeping the colourCut surfaces blacken fast. Drop the quarters into water with lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and boil in a stainless or enamelled pan; bare iron and aluminium will grey them.
- The sauce"Good white sauce" here means a béchamel or velouté — roux with milk or veal stock, simmered until it no longer tastes of flour. Stew the mushrooms in butter first, then chop them fine and stir them in with their liquor; about 4 oz mushrooms to a pint of sauce.
- TemperatureDraining thoroughly matters more than usual, since any retained cooking water will thin the sauce on the dish. Arrange the artichokes while still warm and sauce them immediately, or serve them at room temperature with the sauce hot.
- YieldOne head per person is generous if the artichokes are large; two heads will dress a platter for four as a first course. Ignore the "2d. to 4d. each" — it dates the entry rather than helping you shop.
Cassell's dictionary belongs to the wave of late nineteenth-century British household reference books that borrowed heavily from the French repertoire and labelled dishes by nationality as a shorthand for the sauce. À l'italienne in that vocabulary is often associated with mushrooms — sauce italienne in Escoffier's later codification exists in brown and white forms, both worked with a duxelles of finely chopped mushroom and shallot, the brown adding tomato and lean ham — so the name here is probably describing the mushroom-flecked white sauce rather than any Italian cooking method, though that is an inference. Globe artichokes themselves had long been a kitchen-garden crop in England, grown in walled gardens and eaten by households that could afford the space; the price given, a few pence each, places them as a modest luxury rather than a rarity. The instruction to arrange the quarters with the leaves outwards and to intersperse watercress reflects the period's interest in the composed dish as an object on the table, an aesthetic that ran through Victorian entrée service.