Artichokes, Fried
INGREDIENTS. -6 artichokes, salt and water; for the batter lb. of flour, a little salt, the yolk of 1 egg, milk, lard for frying. AVERAGE COST, 6d. each.
This is one of the abbreviated entries in All About Cookery: quantities and cost, with the method left to the cook's knowledge. Everything below fills that gap.
- The missing methodThe intended procedure is the standard Victorian one: trim the artichokes, boil them in salted water until a leaf pulls away easily, drain and cool, quarter them and remove the choke, then dip in batter and fry until the coating is set and golden. Nothing here is fried from raw.
- The flour quantityThe original reads "lb. of flour" — a fraction has dropped out in printing. Comparable batters in Beeton use about ¼ lb (roughly 1 cup) of flour to one egg yolk and enough milk to reach a coating consistency, but the figure as printed is genuinely ambiguous.
- The batter is a coating, not a fritter batterAdd milk gradually until it runs thickly off the spoon and just veils the artichoke. Beating in the whisked egg white, as some other batter recipes do, lightens it considerably; here only the yolk is specified.
- Which artichokeThese are globe artichokes, not Jerusalem artichokes, which appear separately in the book. Six medium globes yield enough quarters for four to six as a first course.
- Lard and frying temperatureLard fries cleanly at 350–375F and is worth using if you have it; any neutral oil at the same temperature works. The pieces are already cooked through, so they need only two or three minutes to colour.
- Rub with lemonCut artichoke darkens fast. Drop trimmed pieces into acidulated water while you work, then dry them thoroughly or the batter will slide off.
- Cost note"6d. each" is a period price, not a modern guide; it tells you artichokes were a luxury vegetable in a British kitchen rather than an everyday one.
The globe artichoke is the immature flower bud of a thistle, Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus, brought into English gardens from Italy and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century and, in Beeton's day, more a garden crop than a market staple. Battering and frying trimmed artichoke quarters is a familiar Italian and Provençal treatment, and versions of it had appeared in English cookery books, often following French models, long before this book was compiled. The entry is one of the terse ones in this compilation: the ingredients and average cost are given, the frying itself assumed.