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Artichokes with Hollandaise Sauce
Artichokes may be procured both canned and fresh.
If canned, drain, wash in cold water, drain again, then let them stand in French Dressing for one half hour. Drain, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, and fry in deep fat, or dip in Fritter Batter and sauté in pork fat or butter. Serve with Hollandaise Sauce.
Asparagus served in Croustades Cut asparagus in inch pieces and boil according to rule for Boiled Asparagus, drain, add one cup Thick Cream Sauce, and serve in bread croustades.
Two entrées have run together in the original setting: fried artichokes with hollandaise, and asparagus in bread croustades. Treat them separately.
- Which artichokeCanned here most likely means whole hearts or bottoms packed in brine rather than marinated quarters. Drain and rinse as directed; they go into the dressing next, so drain well again before breading, since wet surfaces will not hold crumbs. Fresh artichokes must be trimmed to hearts or bottoms and boiled tender before any of this begins.
- French DressingOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion; consult the book's own rule for its proportions. It is a half-hour marinade for flavour, not a tenderiser.
- Crumbs, egg and crumbsThe standard breading order of the period: dry crumbs first to blot moisture, then beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water, then crumbs again. Let the coated pieces rest ten minutes before frying so the crust sets.
- Deep fat temperatureNo thermometer is given. Fry at 375F; a cube of bread should brown in about forty seconds. Two to three minutes is enough, since the artichokes are already cooked and you are only colouring the crust.
- Pork fatThe saut ed salted salt-pork fat, a common frying medium of the period. Butter alone will brown before the batter is set \-oil mix behaves better.
- Hollandaise timingMake the sauce last and hold it barely warm, off direct heat. Much above 160F the yolks scramble and the emulsion breaks; a covered bowl set in warm water will hold it for a short while only.
- CroustadesCases cut from a stale close-crumbed loaf, hollowed out and either fried in deep fat or brushed with butter and crisped in the oven (a moderate oven, about 350F in modern terms). They must be crisp through, or the cream sauce collapses them.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Dishes of this kind were treated as an entrée in a long dinner, the course that fell between fish and roast, so portions would have been small.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and published in 1907 — one of the many house cookbooks that firms issued to keep their product in the kitchen. Its non-chocolate chapters, this one included, follow the Boston cooking-school manner closely: numbered sauces, cross-references to a master rule, and a fondness for the crumbed-and-fried vegetable entrée. The casual mention of canned artichokes is the interesting part. Globe artichokes were still a specialty crop in the United States at this date, with commercial plantings on the California coast only beginning. Serving them fried under hollandaise, in a course of their own, marks the dish as a piece of restrained restaurant French — the sort of thing an ambitious household cook was expected to manage without a professional kitchen behind her.