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Stuffed Artichokes
2 tablespoonfuls of cream, 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley, 1/2 pound of white meat of chicken, 1 ounce of cooked ham, Grating of nutmeg, Salt and pepper to taste.
Boil and drain the artichokes; chop the chicken and ham fine, and add to it all the other ingredients. Fill the hollow part of the artichokes with this force-meat. Stand them in a buttered baking pan, and bake them in a quick oven fifteen minutes. Dish and pour around them plain Cream Sauce.
A straightforward stuffed globe artichoke, though the original assumes you already know how to trim and hollow one and gives no count of artichokes at all.
- Quantity of artichokesThe recipe never says how many. Half a pound of chicken with an ounce of ham and two tablespoons of cream makes something like a pint and a half of forcemeat, which would fill perhaps three or four large globe artichokes; four is a reasonable working assumption.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Fifteen minutes at that heat is enough only because everything in the pan is already cooked; the bake is to set the filling and brown the top.
- Boil and drainTrim the stem and the top third, snip the thorny tips, and boil 25-40 minutes until an outer leaf pulls away cleanly. Drain them upside down or the water trapped in the cup will thin your sauce.
- The hollow partThere is no hollow until you make one. After boiling, spread the leaves, pull out the fuzzy choke and any small purple inner leaves with a spoon, leaving the heart intact as the floor of the cup.
- White meat of chickenThe recipe specifies "cooked" only for the ham, but a fifteen-minute bake means the chicken must be cooked too: poached or leftover roast breast, chopped fine by knife rather than pulsed to paste in a processor, which turns it pasty.
- Cooked hamAn ounce is a seasoning, not a filler. A dry-cured or smoked ham gives the salt and depth the bland breast needs; check seasoning before adding more salt.
- Force-meatSimply the chopped meat mixture. Two tablespoons of cream is barely enough to bind half a pound of chicken; add a little more, or a spoonful of the artichoke cooking water, until it holds together when pressed.
- Cream sauceA plain white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, and a cup of milk or cream, cooked a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste, seasoned with salt and nutmeg.
Globe artichokes reached English and American cookery through Italy and France, and stuffed artichokes in particular remain a fixture of Italian home cooking, where the filling is more often breadcrumbs, garlic and cheese than meat. The version here uses a forcemeat: finely chopped cooked meat bound with cream and lifted with nutmeg, of the kind used to fill everything from pastry cases to vegetables. Nutmeg with chicken and cream looks odd now but was standard seasoning in that period, and the fact that the recipe expects a cook to have cooked breast meat and an ounce of ham lying about says a good deal about a kitchen built around the reuse of a roast.