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Globe Artichokes
Soak in cold water. Remove lower leaves and cut ends of others. Cook in boiling salted water forty-five minutes or until the leaves pull out. Drain. Serve with Béchamel or Hollandaise sauce or with drawn butter.
A four-line method that assumes you already know what an artichoke looks like on the plate. The gaps worth filling are timing, the choke, and what "drawn butter" meant in 1907.
- Trim more than the book saysBesides pulling off the tough outer leaves and snipping the thorny leaf tips, cut the stem flush so the artichoke sits upright and slice about an inch off the crown. Rub every cut surface with lemon or drop the trimmed heads into acidulated water, or they blacken while you work.
- Forty-five minutes is for a large globeA big 10-12 oz artichoke may genuinely want 40-45 minutes at a bare boil; medium ones are done in 25-35. The test in the recipe is the right one -- an outer leaf should pull free with almost no resistance, and a knife should slide into the base easily.
- The chokeThe recipe says nothing about the hairy choke over the heart. Either scoop it out with a spoon after cooking and before serving, or leave it and let each diner remove it when the leaves are gone. It is inedible either way.
- Pot materialCook in stainless steel, enamel or glass. Artichokes react with bare aluminum and cast iron and turn grey; a slice of lemon in the water helps limit the darkening.
- Keep them submergedArtichokes float. A plate or a small lid set on top of them in the pot keeps the crowns under the water so they cook evenly.
- "Drawn butter"In American cookbooks of this period drawn butter is not simply melted butter -- it is a light sauce of butter, flour and hot water or stock, essentially a plain white sauce made without milk. Melted butter with lemon serves the same purpose if you would rather not make it.
- ServingOne artichoke per person, served warm or at room temperature, with the sauce in individual small dishes for dipping the leaf bases. Provide a bowl for the discarded leaves.
The globe artichoke is the immature flower bud of a cultivated thistle, grown around the Mediterranean since antiquity and reaching American tables in large part through French and Italian cooking. In 1907 Maria Willett Howard compiled this book for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer whose cookbook ranged well beyond cocoa. The entry assumes the reader already knows how an artichoke is eaten and spends its few words on the sauces instead. The three suggested finishes span the period's range of sauce-making: drawn butter as the plainest, Béchamel and Hollandaise as the richer options. Commercial artichoke growing on the California coast, now the centre of American production, was only getting under way in these years.