Home › Vegetables › Stuffed Artichokes
Stuffed Artichokes
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 force-meat, 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.
A late-Victorian treatment of the globe artichoke: par-boiled, hollowed out, filled with seasoned raw forcemeat and finished in the oven. The instructions assume you already know what forcemeat and "melted butter" mean, so those are the two things worth pinning down.
- "Melted butter" is a sauce, not melted butterIn British and Anglo-American cookery of this period, melted butter means a thin white sauce: about 1 tbsp flour cooked in 1 tbsp butter, whisked with 3/4 cup water or light stock, then finished with more butter off the heat. Plain drawn butter also works, but it is not what the writer meant.
- ForcemeatA bound stuffing of finely chopped or ground meat — veal, pork, chicken or leftover cooked meat — with breadcrumbs, egg, herbs and seasoning. Allow roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons per artichoke. If you use raw pork or poultry, bake until the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F; half an hour at moderate heat will usually do it, but check rather than trust the clock.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually read as about 350F, though period usage covers roughly 325-375F. The artichokes are already nearly cooked, so the bake is only there to set the filling and brown the top.
- Boiling the artichokesLarge globe artichokes take 25 to 40 minutes in well-salted boiling water, depending on size; they are ready when an outer leaf pulls away with slight resistance. Stop short of fully tender, since they get another half hour in the oven. Adding a squeeze of lemon to the water keeps the cut surfaces from blackening.
- Removing the chokeAfter draining, invert to drain properly, then spread the outer leaves, pull out the small inner leaves and scoop the fuzzy choke with a teaspoon. Leave the fleshy base intact — it is the best part and it holds the stuffing.
- Trimming firstCut the stem flush and slice an inch off the top of the leaves before boiling. Snapping off the toughest outer row makes the finished dish far easier to eat.
- YieldOne artichoke per person, as the original says, which makes this a first course or a light main rather than a side dish. Serve hot, with the butter sauce in a small jug for dipping the leaves.