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Artichoke Bottoms
Remove all leaves and the choke. Trim bottoms in shape, and cook until soft in boiling, salted, acidulated water. Serve with Hollandaise or Béchamel Sauce.
Four lines of instruction that assume you already know how to butcher an artichoke. The technique is sound; what it omits is time, quantity and the reason for the acid.
- Acidulated waterSimply water with lemon juice or a splash of white wine vinegar added, roughly two tablespoons per quart. Cut artichoke flesh discolours quickly on exposure to air, and the acid slows the enzymatic darkening in both the holding water and the cooking water.
- Getting to the bottomSnap off the outer leaves, cut the remaining cone away flush with the top of the base, then pare the green from the sides and stem end with a paring knife. The recipe takes the fuzzy choke out before cooking, which means digging it out raw with a spoon or the tip of a knife; some cooks prefer to scoop it out after cooking instead.
- How long is "until soft"Twenty to thirty-five minutes at a bare simmer for large globe artichokes, depending on size and age. A paring knife should meet no resistance at the centre. Trimmed bottoms float, so weight them with a plate or a round of parchment.
- The pan mattersCook them in stainless steel or enamel. Aluminium and bare cast iron react with artichokes and turn them grey.
- YieldOne large globe artichoke gives one bottom, about two ounces of edible flesh. Figure two per person as a side dish, three if it is the whole course.
- The saucesBoth Hollandaise and Béchamel appear elsewhere in Farmer's book. Hollandaise is the traditional partner; if you use Béchamel, season it firmly, since a plain white sauce over a mild vegetable gives you very little.
- A shortcut worth takingFrozen or good jarred artichoke bottoms exist and are entirely respectable here. Warm them through in the acidulated water rather than boiling them further.
Artichoke bottoms — fonds d'artichaut — were a fixture of the French repertoire long before they reached American cookbooks, valued less as a vegetable in their own right than as an edible saucer for eggs, purées, sweetbreads or foie gras. Fannie Farmer's inclusion of them in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book sits in the more ambitious end of her vegetable chapter, alongside the mushroom and asparagus dishes that one might read as suggesting a household with money and a cook with training. Commercial cultivation in California, which eventually made globe artichokes ordinary in American markets, expanded in the decades after this book was written. The brevity of the entry is telling — Farmer assumed a reader who had seen an artichoke broken down before and needed only to be reminded of the acidulated water and the choice of sauce.