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Artichokes Stewed in Gravy
Strip off the leaves from the artichokes, remove the chokes, and soak them in lukewarm water for three hours, changing the water three or four times. Place them in a saucepan with enough gravy to cover them, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, the juice of a lemon, and a piece of butter, the size of a walnut, rolled in flour. Let them stew gently until tender, then serve with the sauce poured over them, and as hot as possible. Time to stew, half an hour. Allow one for each person. Probable cost, 2d. to 4d. each.
A Victorian treatment of globe artichoke bottoms, braised in brown gravy and sharpened with mushroom ketchup. The recipe assumes you know what is left after the leaves and choke are gone, and that you have gravy standing by.
- What you are actually cookingStripping the leaves and removing the choke leaves the fond, or bottom, plus a little of the trimmed heart. Pare the stem end and the green fibrous ring around the base with a knife so only pale flesh remains.
- The soak, and a better version of itThree hours of lukewarm water with changes is probably meant to draw out bitterness and keep the cut flesh from blackening, though the recipe does not say. Acidulated cold water, a lemon halved and squeezed into a bowl, does the anti-browning job in minutes; a shorter soak is no loss.
- "Gravy" in this bookIn Victorian usage this generally meant a meat-based brown stock or jus rather than thickened pan gravy from a roast. Use a good beef or veal stock; you will need enough to cover, roughly 1 to 1.5 cups for four bottoms.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not the tomato condiment. It is still made commercially; a tablespoon of soy sauce plus a little Worcestershire gives a comparable savoury depth if you have none.
- Butter the size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Rolled in flour it is in effect a beurre manié -- work it with roughly a tablespoon of flour. The recipe adds it at the start along with the gravy, so stir it in as the liquid comes up to heat to keep it from lumping.
- TimingHalf an hour at a bare simmer suits raw trimmed bottoms; test with a knife tip, which should meet no resistance. Frozen or jarred artichoke bottoms are already cooked and need only ten minutes to take up the sauce.
- Yield and serviceOne bottom per person as a side or savoury course. The dish loses its point cold, so warm the plates and pour the sauce over as directed.
Cassell's assembled its dictionary in the 1870s and 1880s for households running on a cook and a coal range, where a stockpot was often going and "gravy" was a standing ingredient rather than something made at the last moment. That assumption may explain the recipe's brevity: the meat stock is taken for granted, and the costing of twopence to fourpence appears to cover only the artichokes themselves. Globe artichokes, the immature flower buds of Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus, were grown in English kitchen gardens from the sixteenth century onward and were long treated as a luxury vegetable, with the bottoms particularly prized. Mushroom ketchup, meanwhile, was a common savoury bottle of the period, pressed and salted mushroom liquor used much as a modern cook reaches for soy or Worcestershire, and it appears widely in Victorian recipe books wherever a dish needs darkening and deepening.