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Scalloped Globe Artichokes
2 cups cooked artichokes 2 cups white sauce 1 cup buttered crumbs Arrange in a scallop dish and bake until crumbs are brown.
Three lines and no temperature, which is typical of Lowney's: the book assumes you already know how to make white sauce and how hot a scallop dish wants to be. Everything hinges on the sauce being thick enough to hold the artichokes without weeping.
- White sauceA medium sauce of the usual period proportions: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, with salt and a little pepper. Season it more assertively than you think you need, since artichoke and crumbs are both bland.
- Buttered crumbsOne cup of soft fresh breadcrumbs tossed with about 2 tablespoons melted butter until they look damp but still loose. Dry commercial crumbs will brown before they absorb the butter and turn sandy.
- "Cooked artichokes"In this period the phrase usually points to the trimmed bottoms and hearts, boiled tender in salted acidulated water, then cut in halves or quarters. Canned artichoke hearts, drained well and blotted, or frozen hearts cooked and dried off, will stand in; measure them to the 2 cups the recipe calls for rather than going by can count.
- Drain hardArtichokes hold a surprising amount of water. If they go into the sauce wet the dish separates into a pale puddle under the crumbs; pat them dry on a towel first.
- Scallop dishA shallow gratin dish or pie plate, not a deep casserole. The point of a scallop is a large surface of crumbs relative to a thin layer of filling, so keep the depth to about an inch and a half.
- Oven and timeBake at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are evenly brown. Everything is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the top.
- YieldServes four as a side dish, or two or three as a light supper with bread.
Scalloping — a layer of something cooked, a bound sauce and a browned crumb top — was one of the workhorse forms of American cookery around 1900, applied indifferently to oysters, potatoes, salmon, tomatoes and, here, artichoke bottoms. The globe artichoke was still a slightly genteel item in the United States at the time this book appeared; commercial growing around Half Moon Bay and later Castroville, California, expanded through the early twentieth century, and the vegetable's American reputation is generally traced to Italian immigrant growers on that coast. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate firm, and like other manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the era it pairs promotional confectionery chapters with a full general household collection, which is why a three-line artichoke gratin sits in the same volume as pages of cocoa recipes.