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Artichokes, Stuffed
Thoroughly wash the artichokes. Boil them until they are nearly tender, drain them, remove the middle leaves and the chokes, and lay in each a little good forcemeat, and put them in a moderate oven until the meat is sufficiently cooked. Make a little good melted butter to serve with them. Time to bake, half an hour. Allow one for each person. Probable cost, 6d. each.
A straightforward treatment of globe artichokes: par-boil, hollow out, fill, bake. The Victorian text assumes you know what "good forcemeat" and "melted butter" mean, and neither means quite what a modern cook would guess.
- Melted butter is a sauceIn Victorian usage "melted butter" is a flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked together, let down with about a cup of water or light stock, seasoned. It is not simply butter warmed in a pan. Hollandaise or plain drawn butter both work in its place if you prefer.
- ForcemeatA standard Victorian forcemeat is minced veal, pork or chicken bound with breadcrumbs, suet, egg, lemon zest and herbs. Any well-seasoned sausage-meat or a mushroom-and-breadcrumb mixture fills the same role. Make sure it is a mixture that will cook through in half an hour, since the artichoke gives it no help.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. Half an hour at that heat will cook a forcemeat packed loosely into the cavity; a densely stuffed large artichoke may want a check with a thermometer, 165F / 74C at the centre for a meat filling.
- "Nearly tender"Boil the whole artichokes 20-30 minutes depending on size, until an outer leaf pulls away with slight resistance. Fully tender at this stage means they collapse when you scoop them. Acidulate the water with lemon to keep them from blackening.
- Removing the chokeThe hinge of the dish. Pull out the pale central cone of leaves, then scrape every hair of the fuzzy choke away from the base with a teaspoon. Any left behind is unpleasant to eat and no amount of baking softens it.
- DrainingTurn them upside down on a rack for several minutes before stuffing. Water trapped in the cup will steam the filling into a paste and thin the sauce on the plate.
- Yield and costOne artichoke per person, as the original says. The "6d. each" is a period price note, not an instruction — Cassell's gave costs so a housekeeper could budget a menu.
- Eating themServe on a warmed plate with a spare dish for the discarded leaves. Diners pull the outer leaves, scrape the flesh with the teeth, and eat the stuffed base with a knife and fork.
Globe artichokes were established in English gardens by the sixteenth century, generally said to have arrived by way of Italy and the Low Countries, and never quite lost their air of luxury; by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s-80s they were a familiar but still slightly grand vegetable in well-off households, and were sold by the head rather than by weight, which may be why the entry quotes a price per artichoke. Stuffing them with forcemeat is an old idea in both French and Italian cooking — carciofi ripieni and the French artichauts farcis both work on the same principle of scooping out the choke and using the fond as an edible cup. The accompanying "melted butter" marks the recipe as thoroughly English: that flour-bound butter sauce was a standard dressing for boiled vegetables and plain fish in Victorian cookery, and French writers of the period were often unflattering about English sauces.