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Cardoons, Boiled
Choose a few heads of sound white cardoons. Cut them into pieces about six inches long, remove the prickles, and blanch them in boiling water for a quarter of an hour. Scrape off the skin and tie them in bundles. Cover them with nicely-flavoured stock, and boil till tender. Drain them, and serve on toast, with plenty of good melted butter. Sufficient, five or six heads for a dish.
Cardoons are the leaf stalks of a thistle closely related to the globe artichoke, sold in late autumn and winter at Italian and North African greengrocers. The recipe is straightforward; nearly all the difficulty is in the trimming.
- The hinge: acidulated waterCut cardoon flesh browns quickly once exposed. Have a bowl of water with the juice of a lemon beside you and drop each piece in as it is cut, or the finished dish may be grey rather than ivory.
- "Sound white" headsThe Victorian market sold cardoons blanched under earth or wrapped in straw, which kept them pale and mild. Modern stalks are often greener and more bitter; choose firm, heavy heads with no rubbery flex, and discard the coarse outer ribs entirely.
- Prickles and stringsTrim the spines from the edges, then pull the stringy fibres from the concave side with a peeler or knife, as you would a tough celery stalk. This matters more than the recipe implies — unstrung cardoon stays fibrous however long it cooks.
- The fifteen-minute blanchA quarter of an hour is right here, and is not the usual Victorian overcooking. The first boil softens the skin so it can be scraped and draws off some bitterness; the water may be salted and can be discarded.
- "Boil till tender"Reckon on 40 to 60 minutes in simmering stock, longer for thick winter stalks. Test with a knife tip; tender means yielding all the way through, with no squeak.
- Nicely-flavoured stockA light chicken or veal stock suits it. Vegetable stock works, but keep it unassertive — cardoon has a delicate artichoke flavour that a dark beef stock will bury.
- Melted butterIn Victorian cookery "melted butter" usually means the standard English butter sauce — butter thickened with a little flour and water or stock, rather than simply butter melted in a pan. Hollandaise or a mustard cream sauce are the modern equivalents in spirit.
- YieldFive or six heads yield surprisingly little once the outer ribs are stripped; expect four to six side servings from that quantity.
Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus) and the globe artichoke derive from the same species, the one grown for its stalks and the other for its flower bud; they were a familiar winter vegetable in British kitchen gardens from the seventeenth century onward, usually earthed up or straw-wrapped through autumn to blanch them pale and tender. Cassell's treats them as unremarkable, which tells you how much the English vegetable repertoire has narrowed since: the cardoon fell out of general cultivation in Britain during the twentieth century while remaining a fixture in Italy, Spain and southern France, where it appears in Piedmontese bagna cauda and in Provençal Christmas cooking. The plant is also the source of a traditional vegetable rennet — its dried flowers are still used to curdle the milk for several Portuguese and Spanish sheep's-milk cheeses.