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Brussels Artichokes
Wash well some globe artichokes, and boil them in salted water. Meanwhile make a good mushroom filling, highly seasoned, of cooked mushroom, dipped into butter, pepper, salt, a few breadcrumbs, and shreds of ham. Remove the center leaves from the vegetable and as much of the choke as you can. Fill up with the mushroom force and stew gently in brown sauce flavored with a bunch of herbs.
A stuffed-artichoke dish written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you knew the basics. The gaps are all in timing and in the sauce.
- Cook the artichokes first, and test themLarge globe artichokes take 30-45 minutes at a bare boil, small ones 20-25. They are done when a base leaf pulls away with no resistance and a knife enters the heart easily. Undercooked artichokes will not soften further in the brown sauce.
- Acidulate the waterA squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar in the salted water keeps the cut edges and the hearts from going grey-brown. Cook them in a non-reactive pan for the same reason, and drain them upside down so the cavity empties.
- Getting the choke outWork while the artichokes are warm but handleable. Pull out the small inner leaves, then scrape the hairy choke away from the heart with a teaspoon; fibres left behind are unpleasant to eat.
- "Dipped into butter"Read this as tossed or sweated in butter. The mushrooms are cooked in butter until their liquid has gone, then bound with the breadcrumbs and ham. If the filling is wet it will slump out into the sauce.
- "Mushroom force"Forcemeat, i.e. stuffing. It should be chopped fairly fine and seasoned hard, since it is competing with both the artichoke and the sauce.
- Brown sauce and the bunch of herbsThe period sense is espagnole or a well-reduced brown stock sauce, not a flour-thickened gravy from a packet. A good beef or veal stock reduced with a little roux does the job. The "bunch of herbs" is a bouquet garni: parsley stalks, thyme, a bay leaf, tied so it can be lifted out.
- The stewing stageBarely enough sauce to come a third of the way up, lid on, gentle heat for 15-20 minutes so the artichokes take up the flavour. A hard simmer will loosen the leaves and the stuffing will float away.
- YieldOne artichoke per person as a first course. About 8 oz mushrooms and 2 oz ham will fill four.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes given by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and it reads throughout like dictation from cooks working from memory rather than from notes -- hence the compressed instructions and the missing times. The dish is Brussels-style rather than a distinct variety of vegetable: these are globe artichokes, not the tuberous Jerusalem sort, and Belgian market gardening around Brussels and Mechelen was well known before the war for forced and hothouse vegetables. Stuffing a boiled artichoke bottom with a buttery mushroom duxelles and finishing it in a brown sauce is thoroughly French in method, which is what you would expect from a Belgian bourgeois kitchen of the period; the shreds of ham are the frugal touch that makes it a household dish rather than a restaurant one.