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Burr Artichokes
Strip off the coarse outer leaves, cut the stalk, and lay several hours in cold water. Then put in boiling water, with their leaves downward. Keep covered with a plate. Boil steadily two or three hours. Serve with butter, pepper, salt, mustard, and vinegar.--Mrs. R.
A plain treatment of the globe artichoke, with one instruction that no modern cook should follow: the boiling time.
- "Burr artichoke"This is the globe artichoke, the immature flower bud of Cynara scolymus. The "burr" is generally taken to refer to the bristling head, distinguishing it from the Jerusalem artichoke, a tuber. Both were grown in nineteenth-century Virginia gardens, and period cookbooks name them separately.
- Two or three hours is far too longA trimmed globe artichoke is tender in 25 to 45 minutes of steady boiling, depending on size. Three hours reduces it to grey mush and leaches out most of the flavour. Test by pulling a leaf from near the base: it should come away with slight resistance.
- The cold soakSeveral hours is more than needed. Half an hour in cold water acidulated with lemon juice or vinegar dislodges grit from between the leaves and slows the browning of cut surfaces.
- Leaves downwardThe recipe sets the head down and the stem end up. The plate on top holds the buoyant heads under the water.
- Trim more than the recipe saysBesides the coarse outer leaves and stalk, cut an inch off the top of the head and snip the thorny leaf tips with scissors. Rub the cut base with lemon.
- Use a non-reactive panArtichokes discolour badly in bare cast iron or aluminium. Stainless or enamelled is better, and a squeeze of lemon in the water keeps them pale.
- The sauceButter, pepper, salt, mustard and vinegar are the components of a warm mustard vinaigrette or a butter sauce sharpened with mustard. Whisk them together rather than serving five things separately; a tablespoon of vinegar to three of melted butter with a teaspoon of mustard is a reasonable ratio.
- ServingOne medium artichoke per person as a first course. Pull the leaves, dip the fleshy base of each, scrape off the inedible fuzzy choke, and eat the heart.
The globe artichoke came to the American South by way of English and French kitchen gardens and was well established in Virginia by the eighteenth century ichokes in the Monticello garden book. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878, with 1879 printings following), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housewives, is full of these initialled attributions like "Mrs. R." That accounts for the terseness here, and probably for the boiling time as well: cooks working with late-season artichokes from their own beds, tougher and woodier than anything sold today, boiled them until they surrendered. The accompaniment of mustard and vinegar with melted butter is often said to reflect an older English habit, closer to the seventeenth-century way of dressing boiled vegetables than to the hollandaise that later became standard.