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Artichokes as a Basis for Jardinière
(of vegetables).
Remove the outer leaves of six artichokes, cut off the tops and also the furze which adheres to the bottom. Boil and drain them. While they are boiling prepare the Macédoine.
Cut two small carrots and one turnip, into shapes, with the vegetable cutter. Put them into a saucepan of salted water and boil until tender. In another saucepan boil a small quantity of string beans; in another a dozen asparagus tips or a few flowerets of cauliflower, and a half pint of green peas. When these are done, drain, and mix them carefully together. Make a half pint of Spanish sauce; mix them gently with it. When the artichokes are done, drain, and trim them perfectly round. Fill them with the Macédoine of vegetables and serve them as a garnish to beef à la mode, fillet of beef, braised turkey or braised leg of mutton.
ARTICHOKES, à l'ITALIENNE.
Trim and boil the artichokes as directed for sauce Hollandaise. After they are drained, remove all the outer leaves, using only the "choke." Arrange these in a circle, one slightly overlapping the other, and pour over them Italian sauce. 12 artichokes,
Two related preparations: globe artichoke bottoms used as edible cups for a diced-vegetable macédoine, and a simpler dish of artichoke hearts under Italian sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the vocabulary has drifted.
- "Furze" is the choke"Furze" is the fuzzy choke -- The recipe has you cut off the fuzz that adheres to the bottom and discard it. Confusingly, the second recipe says to use "only the 'choke,'" which in context can only mean the fleshy heart or bottom left after the leaves are stripped, since that is what can be overlapped in a circle. Discard the fuzz in both cases.
- Trim before or after boilingRub cut surfaces with lemon and boil in acidulated water, 20-35 minutes depending on size, until a leaf pulls away easily. Trimming the bottoms "perfectly round" is far easier warm and drained than raw.
- Macédoine vs. jardinièreA macédoine is vegetables cut small and mixed; jardinière strictly means batons. The recipe uses a vegetable cutter for rounds or dice — any uniform small cut works, provided every vegetable is the same size so the mixture looks deliberate.
- Cook the vegetables separately, as toldThe separate pans are not fussiness. Carrot and turnip need 5-8 minutes, beans 4-5, asparagus tips and cauliflower 3-4, peas 2-3. Boiled together, the peas turn grey before the turnip softens.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: a brown roux moistened with brown stock and tomato, simmered down and strained. A half pint is one cup, which is generous for six artichokes — dress the vegetables lightly rather than drowning them.
- Italian sauceSauce italienne is a brown sauce: demi-glace with a duxelles of mushroom and shallot, finished with chopped ham and herbs. Period versions often carry some tomato purée, but it is not a tomato sauce in the modern Italian-American sense.
- The Hollandaise cross-referenceThe second recipe leans on an earlier entry in the book for trimming and boiling. Treat it as the same method described above.
- Yield and roleSix filled bottoms serve as a garnish, not a course; the book positions them around beef " à la mode, fillet, braised turkey or mutton. The stray "12 artichokes" at the end appears to be a fragment of an ingredient tally, though which recipe it belongs to is not clear from the text.
Filled artichoke bottoms belong to the grammar of nineteenth-century dressed-platter service, where a roast came to table ringed with small garnishes that were themselves complete little dishes. Macédoine — a mixture of many small pieces — was named for Alexander's empire of many peoples, a joke of French kitchen slang that is generally traced to the eighteenth century, and jardinière simply means "in the gardener's wife's manner." The globe artichoke reached English and American tables largely through French cookery, and books of this period spend more words on trimming it than on cooking it. That a book of this kind expects its reader to have espagnole and italienne on hand says a good deal about the ambitions of the American cooking-school era, when French sauce work was taught as ordinary competence rather than restaurant craft.