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Artichoke a la Barigoule
6 artichokes 4 oz. fat pork 2 cups chopped mushrooms 2 tablespoons chopped shallots 1 teaspoon minced parsley 1 tablespoon Gold Medal flour 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup Spanish Sauce 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Few grates nutmeg 1 cup broth 1 glass white wine Prepare the artichokes as directed above, boil them thirty minutes and drain. Mince the pork and fry with shallots; add the mushrooms and parsley and simmer ten minutes. Blend with it the flour, mixed with the butter, add the Spanish Sauce and seasonings. Stuff the artichokes and tie each with a string; brown the outside in a little olive oil, add the broth and wine; cover and cook forty minutes in a moderate oven. When ready to serve remove the strings and arrange on a hot platter and pour the sauce over and around them. Garnish with a whole mushroom on top of each.
A Provençal braise translated into American household terms, with a few instructions that the book assumes you already know from the preceding page.
- "Prepare the artichokes as directed above"Standard preparation for stuffing runs: trim the stem and the tough outer leaves, cut off the top, and scoop out the fuzzy choke and inner leaves to make a cavity. Rub the cut surfaces with lemon or hold them in acidulated water so they do not blacken.
- Fat porkSalt pork or unsmoked fatback, not bacon. If you use salt pork, rinse it and skip the added salt until you taste at the end; a smoked bacon will push the dish toward something else entirely.
- Spanish SauceThe book's anglicization of sauce espagnole, a brown stock sauce thickened with a dark roux. Half a cup of good reduced brown gravy or demi-glace does the same job here.
- A glass of winePeriod measuring tables usually put a wine glass at about 2 fluid ounces (a quarter cup), though the term was loose and larger readings are sometimes given. Use a dry white.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F. The covered pot should barely bubble; the point of the forty minutes is to finish the artichokes and reduce the wine and broth into the sauce.
- Boiling timeThirty minutes is generous for modern globe artichokes, which are usually tender in 20 to 25 minutes. Since they get another forty in the oven, stop the initial boil while the base still offers resistance to a knife or the leaves will slump off the finished dish.
- The stuffingTwo cups of chopped mushrooms will throw a lot of liquid; cook them until the pan is nearly dry before adding the flour-and-butter paste, or the filling will be too loose to stay in the cups.
- Tying and browningKitchen twine around each artichoke keeps the leaves closed while it browns and braises. Brown the bottoms and sides in oil in the same pot you will braise in, then add the liquid so nothing is lost.
- YieldSix stuffed artichokes, one per person as a first course or a light main.
Barigoule is Provençal, and the name is generally traced not to a cook or a town but to a mushroom: barigoulo in Provençal is the thistle or milk-cap mushroom, though whether it once filled the hollowed artichoke or simply named the manner in which the artichoke was cooked remains unsettled. The mushrooms in this version may echo that older dish, even after the addition of salt pork, shallots, wine and a brown sauce turned it into something closer to restaurant cooking than farmhouse cooking. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook says a good deal about the ambitions of the American household kitchen in the early twentieth century, where a single tablespoon of Gold Medal flour was reason enough to print a French braise.