Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cardoons, Fried
Cardoons, Fried
Proceed as above, and when the cardoons are tender, melt a little butter in a pan, drain the cardoons, dredge a little flour over, and fry them till they are nicely browned. Send good melted butter to table with them. Time to fry, ten minutes. Sufficient, five or six heads for a dish.
This entry is the second half of a pair — "proceed as above" means boil the cardoons first, so you need the boiling method before the frying makes sense. Everything here hinges on getting the stalks genuinely tender before they meet the butter.
- What a cardoon isA cultivated thistle grown for its stalks rather than its flower bud, closely related to the globe artichoke and tasting of it. Look for them in Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers in late autumn and winter, sold as cardi or carduni.
- The step the recipe assumesTrim the outer stalks, strip the strings with a peeler as you would celery, cut into finger lengths and drop straight into acidulated water — cut cardoon browns within minutes. Simmer in salted water with lemon juice, or a flour-and-lemon blanc, for anything from half an hour to well over an hour, depending on the stalks, until a knife passes through with no resistance. Undercooked cardoon is fibrous and no amount of frying will fix it.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn Victorian usage melted butter means a thickened butter sauce — flour cooked in butter and let down with water or the cooking liquid, seasoned and finished with more butter; the exact proportions vary from book to book. Plainly melted butter is what the pan gets; the table gets the sauce.
- Frying temperatureButter alone at frying heat will brown and burn before the flour colours. Add a spoonful of oil, or clarify the butter, and keep the pan at a steady medium-high so the dredged surface crisps in the ten minutes given.
- Dry them wellDrain the boiled pieces and blot them on a cloth before dredging. Wet cardoon takes up the flour in lumps and steams rather than browns.
- Yield"Five or six heads" may reflect smaller market cardoons than those sold today; a single large modern head, once trimmed of leaves and outer stalks, yields enough for three or four people as a side dish.
Cardoons were grown in English kitchen gardens from the seventeenth century onward and appear in Victorian cookery books in much this form — boiled, then fried, gratinated, or sent up in white sauce — before falling almost entirely out of British use in the twentieth century. Cassell's treats them as unremarkable enough to need no introduction, which is a fair index of how much the ordinary vegetable repertoire has narrowed since. They survive best in Italy, Spain and southern France, where cardoons remain a Christmas vegetable: the Piedmontese eat the pale blanched stalks raw with bagna cauda, and Lyonnais cooks bake them with marrow and gravy. The plant is the same species as the globe artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, selected for stem instead of bud, and its flowers have long been used as a vegetable rennet in Iberian sheep's-milk cheeses.