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Baked Artichokes
Boil six artichokes for one and a half hours, drain as directed in preceding recipe. When thoroughly dry, tie a thin slice of pork around each artichoke, put a slice of onion on top and stand them in a baking dish. Chop fine two ounces of bacon, put it in the frying pan with two chopped shallots, six mushrooms, a tablespoonful of parsley, and a half pint of stock. Bring to boiling point and pour it into the centre of the artichokes, replacing the slice of onion. Put them in a moderate oven and bake for threequarters of an hour. Then remove the slices of pork, dish the artichokes, fill the centres with sauce Hollandaise and serve.
A Victorian-style barded artichoke: whole globe artichokes pre-boiled, wrapped in fat pork, then baked with a stock-and-bacon filling. Two things need correcting before you start — the boiling time and the fact that the recipe never tells you to remove the choke.
- Hollow out the centre firstThe "centre" that receives the stock and later the hollandaise only exists if the fuzzy choke and the innermost leaves have been pulled out. Do this after boiling, while the artichokes are still warm, and spread the outer leaves gently so they hold their cup shape.
- Ninety minutes is far too longModern globe artichokes boil tender in 30 to 45 minutes depending on size — test by pulling an outer leaf, which should come away with light resistance. They then get another 45 minutes in the oven, so under-boil rather than over-boil or the leaves collapse to mush.
- Moderate oven350F. Cover the dish loosely with foil for the first half hour so the exposed leaf tips do not scorch.
- The slice of porkThis is barding fat — salt pork, unsmoked fatback or thick pancetta, cut thin enough to bend around the artichoke and tied with kitchen string. Streaky bacon works but adds smoke the hollandaise was not designed to compete with. The recipe has it removed before the artichokes are dished.
- Half pint of stockOne cup in US measure; a British half pint of the period is a little over that. Use a light veal or chicken stock. Divided among six artichokes it is only about three tablespoons each, which is the point — it flavours and steams rather than poaches.
- Drain them properlyThe instruction to drain until "thoroughly dry" matters. Invert the boiled artichokes on a rack for ten minutes; water trapped between the leaves will dilute the filling and later thin the hollandaise.
- Hollandaise and timingMake the sauce while the artichokes bake and hold it warm off direct heat, no hotter than about 140F. It cannot be reheated and it cannot wait long, so have the artichokes plated before you finish it.
- YieldSix, one artichoke apiece, as a first course or light main. Provide a bowl for discarded leaves.
Whole artichokes barded with fat pork and baked in stock belong to the French repertoire that English and American cookbooks borrowed wholesale in the second half of the nineteenth century — the shallots, mushrooms, chopped parsley and finishing hollandaise are all standard equipment of that borrowing. The globe artichoke is a cultivated thistle, eaten since antiquity around the Mediterranean and generally traced in its modern form to Italian gardens of the fifteenth century; it reached northern kitchens as a luxury vegetable and kept that reputation for a long time, which is why books of this kind treat it with a butter sauce and a piece of pork rather than as a plain boiled dish. The fat wrapping had a clear purpose in ovens that were uneven and dry: the pork both basted and shielded the outer leaves, doing the work that a sheet of foil does now.