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Fried Artichokes
Boil and drain six artichokes. Put them in a bowl, sprinkle them with vinegar, and dust with salt and pepper, and stand aside for one hour.
Break an egg into a soup dish, beat it lightly, add a tablespoonful of warm water. Dip the artichokes first into this and then into flour, and fry in smoking hot fat. Serve with sauce Tartare.
A straightforward fritter treatment for globe artichokes, written when they arrived at market small enough to boil and fry whole. The vinegar marinade is the step that carries the dish, so do not skip it.
- Which artichokeThis means globe artichokes, not Jerusalem artichokes. Six small ones (about 3 inches) can be trimmed, halved and used more or less whole; with large globes, boil them, discard leaves and choke, and fry the quartered bottoms and the tender inner leaf bases.
- Prep before boilingSnap off the tough outer leaves, cut an inch off the top, trim the stem, and rub or hold the cut surfaces in acidulated water so they do not blacken. Boil 15-25 minutes depending on size, until a knife slides into the base with no resistance, then drain upside down so no water sits in the cup.
- The hour of marinatingThe vinegar-salt-pepper rest is seasoning, not a garnish step. Boiled artichoke is bland and waterlogged; an hour in vinegar draws off moisture and gives the fried piece a sharp edge that stands up to the tartare sauce. Blot dry before coating or the flour will slide off.
- Coating orderEgg first, then flour, as written -- the reverse of the usual flour-then-egg sequence. It gives a thin, patchy, crisp shell rather than a full batter jacket. The tablespoon of warm water simply loosens the egg so it drains rather than clings in blobs.
- "Smoking hot fat"Read this as roughly 365-375F, deep enough to float the pieces. Fat hot enough to smoke would be at or past the smoke point of lard or a modern neutral oil; go by thermometer, or by a cube of bread that browns in under a minute.
- Sauce TartarePeriod recipes vary: most often a mayonnaise base with chopped capers, pickles, onion or shallot and parsley, though some versions are built on hard-boiled yolks and some lean heavily on mustard. It is served cold against the hot fritters, and is the salt-and-acid counterweight to the frying.
- YieldSix small artichokes serve three or four as a first course, or two as a light supper dish. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, and drain on paper rather than holding them in a covered dish, which steams the crust soft.
Frying boiled artichokes after a vinegar marinade is an old Italian and Provencal habit -- carciofi fritti and the artichokes of the Roman fritto misto follow the same logic -- and sauce Tartare comes out of the French kitchen. The insistence on serving them with a cold sauce is characteristic of the period's vegetable cookery, which tended to treat a boiled vegetable as raw material for a second, more elaborate dish rather than as something finished in itself.