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Vegetables, or Légumes, and Salads
ARTICHOKES.
ARTICHOKES plainly boiled are served with butter sauce in a sauce boat as Artichauts sauce au beurre, or with Dutch sauce, sauce Hollandaise. Artichoke bottoms as- Artichauts à la bonne femme are boiled and served with white sauce. à la Bruxellaise are cut in quarters, cooked in white sauce, and arranged in a border with Brussels sprouts and Maître d'hôtel sauce in the centre. au velouté are dressed in the same way, and served in the sauce with cream and yolks of eggs. à la Lyonnaise-cooked in butter and served in brown sauce with onions, etc. à l'Italienne-cooked in stock, wine, etc., and served in Italian sauce. farcis-stuffed, and cooked with oil and bacon, etc. à l'essence de jambon-stuffed, braised, and served covered with a purée of ham.
Artichauts à la Valentine-stuffed with braised chestnuts and white sauce, covered with whipped white of egg and baked; served on croûtons with tomato sauce. à la Marquise-stuffed with chopped mushrooms, ham, herbs and breadcrumbs, and cooked in wine and stock. à la Barigoule-stuffed with chopped bacon, mushrooms, etc., braised and served with Italian sauce. farcis à l'Italienne-the stuffing is made of onion, breadcrumbs and grated cheese. à la Hollandaise-stuffed with a purée made from the leaves, and served with Hollandaise sauce. en mayonnaise-served cold, coated with Mayonnaise sauce and sprinkled with chopped parsley.
Crème d'artichauts is a purée of artichokes with cream, steamed in a mould; served with cream sauce.
Globe artichokes, and then a long run of dishes made from artichoke bottoms. The distance between those two things is hours of knife work, and the page never mentions it.
- An artichoke bottom is what is leftFonds d’artichaut means the base with the leaves cut away, the choke scooped out and the sides pared down to the pale flesh: a disc about the size of a drinks coaster, from a vegetable the size of a fist. Most of what you buy is discarded, or, as in the Hollandaise entry here, cooked separately into a purée and put back.
- They go blackCut surfaces oxidise within minutes. Drop each trimmed base into water with lemon juice as you work, and cook them in water with lemon and a spoonful of flour if you want them to stay pale. The page assumes this and says nothing about it.
- Jars and frozenArtichoke bottoms are sold ready prepared, in brine or frozen, and for a dish where they serve as a vehicle for stuffing and sauce, which is all of them here, they do the job. Fresh ones are worth the labour only when the artichoke itself is the point of the dish.
- Barigoule survivesÀ la Barigoule, stuffed with chopped bacon and mushrooms, braised and served with Italian sauce, is still a live name in French cooking, usually for artichokes braised with vegetables, wine and oil. It is one of the few names on these pages a cook today would recognise without the gloss.
- Not Jerusalem artichokesEverything here is the globe artichoke, the thistle flower. The Jerusalem artichoke is a tuber from a different plant and gets its own section. They share a name and nothing else, and the dishes do not cross over.
- Crème d’artichauts is a mouldA purée with cream, steamed in a mould, turned out and served with cream sauce. Moulded vegetable creams were an ordinary course, and the difficulty is always water: the purée has to be dry enough to hold its shape, which means cooking it down before anything else goes in.
Count the labour on this page. More than a dozen dishes begin with trimmed artichoke bottoms, and several then go on to be stuffed with chopped mushroom, ham, herbs and crumbs, or with braised chestnuts, before being baked and set on croutons. That is a kitchen with more than one pair of hands in it, working from a book that treats the preparation as beneath mention. The chapter opens with the plainest version of all, artichokes boiled whole with butter sauce in a boat, eaten leaf by leaf with the fingers, and then never goes back to it. Everything after that is the vegetable taken apart and rebuilt into something served with a spoon.