Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Artichokes
Scalloped Artichokes
Boil one quart of artichokes as directed. Drain 'and cut into slices. Make one pint of Cream Sauce. Put a layer of this sauce in the bottom of a baking dish, then a layer of artichokes, sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper, then another layer of sauce, and so on until all is used. Sprinkle the top over lightly with stale bread crumbs and stand in a quick oven about fifteen minutes, to brown. Serve in the dish in which they were baked.
BOILED ASPARAGUS No. I Cut off the tough white ends, and wash the asparagus carefully in cold water. Scrape the white part which remains, and throw into cold water until all is finished. Tie in small bundles, put in boiling water, and boil for twenty minutes; then add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil ten minutes longer. While the asparagus is boiling, toast squares of bread, butter while hot and lay on a heated platter. Lift the asparagus carefully from the water; drain, and place on the toast with the heads all one way. Cut the strings and carefully remove them, and stand the dish where the contents will keep warm. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a frying pan to melt, add to it one tablespoonful of flour, mix until smooth, and then add a half pint of the water in which the asparagus was boiled, stir continually until it boils, add a half teaspoonful of salt, two dashes of black pepper and one ounce of butter, take it from the fire and stir until the butter melts; pour over the asparagus and serve.
BOILED ASPARAGUS No. 2 Wash and boil the asparagus as directed in the preceding recipe. When done, drain and serve on a folded napkin. Sauce Hollandaise should be served with it.
Three recipes have run together on this page: a scalloped artichoke gratin and two treatments of boiled asparagus. The artichoke dish is straightforward once you work out which artichoke is meant and how hot the oven should be.
- Which artichokeA quart of artichokes, boiled and then sliced, points to Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) rather than globe artichokes, which are not usually measured by the quart nor sliced into a scallop. Reckon on roughly 1 1/2 lb of sunchokes, peeled or well scrubbed.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The dish goes in already hot and fully cooked; the fifteen minutes are only to set the layers and colour the crumbs.
- Cream sauceA pint of period cream sauce is a white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk or thin cream, seasoned. Keep it on the loose side, since the crumbs and the reheating will thicken it.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine dried sand sold in canisters, and not fresh soft crumbs, which go pasty. Toss them with a little melted butter if you want reliable browning at this short a bake.
- YieldA quart of vegetable with a pint of sauce serves four to six as a side dish.
- The asparagus timing is wrongThirty minutes of boiling, as written, reduces asparagus to grey threads. Modern practice is 3-5 minutes for medium spears in salted water, and the salt goes into the pot at the start rather than partway through.
- Save the cooking waterThe sauce for No. 1 is built on the asparagus water rather than milk, which is the point of the recipe — do not pour it away. With a shorter boil there is more flavour left in it, not less.
- Serving on a napkinNo. 2 is the formal service: drained spears laid on a folded linen napkin to absorb the last of the water, with hollandaise alongside. The napkin does the work a wire rack or a warm platter does now.
Scalloping — layering a cooked vegetable with white sauce and crumbs and browning it briefly — was a common American way of dressing up vegetables in the late nineteenth century, and the method suits a short bake: the components are cooked in advance on the stove, and the oven is only wanted for a quarter of an hour. The vegetable here is probably the Jerusalem artichoke, a North American tuber that has nothing to do with Jerusalem: the name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, the plant being a relative of the sunflower rather than of the globe artichoke. The asparagus recipes that follow show the period habit of pairing a boiled vegetable with buttered toast, which caught the sauce.