Artichokes, Boiled
INGREDIENTS. To each gallon of water allow 1 Trim and boil the artichokes, and rub heaped tablespoonful of salt, a piece of soda | them over with lemon-juice, to keep them ARTICHOKES À L'ITALIENNE. white. When they are quite tender, take them up, remove the chokes, and divide the bottoms; dip each piece into batter, fry them in hot lard or dripping, and garnish the dish with crisped parsley.
TIME.-20 minutes to boil the artichokes; 5 to 7 minutes to fry them.
SEASONABLE from July to the beginning of September.
Artichokes à l'Italienne. -INGREDIENTS.-6 artichokes, salt and butter, about 1/24 pint of good gravy. AVERAGE COST, 6d. each.
Trim and cut the artichokes into ASPARAGUS, BOILED. pear, and to serve them covered with white sauce, garnished with Brussels sprouts.
TIME.-About 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from September to June.
What survives here is a set of instructions for globe artichokes boiled, then broken down and fried in batter, with fragments of two neighbouring entries attached. The workable procedure is the fried one: boil, trim, remove the choke, batter, fry.
- The hinge: get the choke outOnce the artichoke is tender, the hairy choke lifts away from the fleshy bottom with a spoon. Any fibres left behind will be unpleasant in the finished fritter, and they will not soften with frying.
- Skip the sodaThe pinch of soda in the cooking water was a Victorian habit meant to hold colour. It softens the leaves to mush and dulls the flavour. Salted water with a squeeze of lemon, or a lemon half dropped in the pot, does the job the lemon-juice rub is also there for.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes suits small young artichokes only. Large globes usually need 30 to 45 minutes; test by pulling an outer leaf, which should come away with no resistance.
- Salt proportionA heaped tablespoon per gallon is roughly a tablespoon per 4.5 litres, which is a light hand by modern standards for vegetable water. Season to taste.
- Frying fat and heatLard or beef dripping both work and both flavour the batter well; any neutral fat will do. Bring it to 350-375F. Five to seven minutes is right for pieces that go in already cooked and hot -- you are only setting and colouring the batter.
- Dry the piecesBoiled artichoke bottoms hold water. Drain them well and pat dry before dipping, or the batter will slide off and the fat will spit.
- Crisped parsleyWhole sprigs, thoroughly dried, dropped into the same fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing. They scorch fast, so lift them the moment they turn a deeper green.
- Season and yieldThe book gives July to the beginning of September; imported globes are sold most of the year now. The six artichokes of the neighbouring entry, quartered, would stretch to a first course for several.
The globe artichoke, Cynara scolymus, is a thistle grown for its immature flower head, and it reached English gardens from Italy and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. It kept its Italian associations firmly enough that a dish of them dressed with gravy and butter was still labelled a l'Italienne in Victorian household books, and battered fried artichoke -- often linked to the Roman carciofi fritti -- was one treatment English cooks took up. The sixpence each costed in that same a l'Italienne entry is a reminder that these were a gentleman's-garden vegetable rather than a staple: expensive, fiddly, seasonal, and worth the pages given to them chiefly because a household with a kitchen garden would suddenly have more than it knew what to do with.