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Artichokes, Bordeaux Fashion
Trim your artichokes and blanch twenty minutes, place them in cold water, then scoop out the interior with the handle of a spoon, taking out every particle of the inside, and have ready the following sauce. Peel thirty large button onions, and cut them up in rings, put them in a stewpan with a little oil, and fry to a light yellow colour; add half a pint of white sauce and two table-spoonfuls of bread-crumbs, mix well, then add eighteen stoned olives and the fillets of four anchovies well washed; stew until all is well-cooked, then season with a little pepper, sugar, and a piece of scraped garlic the size of a pea. Pour this into the artichokes, and when done serve with a little white sauce in each. Probable cost, 6d. each.
A stuffed globe artichoke with a strongly savoury onion, olive and anchovy filling. The original is vague about the final cooking, which is the one thing worth settling before you start.
- "When done"The recipe never says how the filled artichokes are finished. One workable modern approach is to set them upright in a snug pan or dish with an inch of stock or water, cover, and cook gently until a leaf pulls away cleanly and the base takes a knife tip without resistance. The timing and any oven setting are a modern suggestion, not the book's; it gives no temperatures.
- Blanching and the chokeTwenty minutes in boiling salted water is enough to soften large globes for scooping; the cold-water plunge stops the cooking and makes them easier to handle. Remove the hairy choke and the small inner leaves completely, since anything left behind is unpleasantly fibrous. Rub the cut surfaces with lemon to stop them blackening.
- Half a pintAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, a little under 1 1/4 US cups. "White sauce" here means a plain flour-and-butter sauce: a bechamel, or a veloute made with veal or chicken stock, seasoned but not otherwise flavoured.
- Button onionsThese are pearl or picklers, about 3/4 inch across, not spring onions. Thirty of them yields roughly 12 oz peeled. Frying them only to "a light yellow colour" matters, as browning pushes the filling sweet and muddies the anchovy.
- AnchoviesThe recipe calls for the fillets of four whole anchovies, that is eight fillets, roughly eight fillets from a modern oil-packed tin. Salt-cured anchovies are saltier than oil-packed, so taste before adding salt; the recipe calls only for pepper and sugar.
- Garlic the size of a peaA very small fraction of a modern clove, scraped rather than crushed so it dissolves into the sauce. It reads as a background seasoning rather than a flavour in its own right.
- BreadcrumbsTwo tablespoons of dry crumbs are there to bind the filling so it stays in the artichoke cup. If the mixture looks loose after stewing, let it reduce rather than adding more crumbs, which quickly turn it pasty.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many artichokes the filling covers; the quantities suggest about four large ones. The little white sauce served in each cup is specified by the recipe itself.
Cassell's gives a cost for this entry — "probable cost, 6d. each" — which tells you artichokes were a greengrocer's luxury in late Victorian Britain rather than a garden staple. The name is a little loose: dishes labelled à la bordelaise more usually involve shallots, red wine or marrow, while the olives, anchovy and garlic here point south and east toward Provence and Languedoc. Such drift is often said to be common in nineteenth-century English dictionaries of cookery, where French regional labels may have signalled a general southern character rather than a documented local practice. What survives intact is the technique: blanch, hollow, stuff and braise a globe artichoke, a method traceable in Italian and French cooking well before Cassell's, and one that still produces the best use of a large late-season head whose leaves have grown too tough to eat one by one.