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Stuffed Artichokes
Prepare and cook as Boiled Artichokes, having them slightly underdone. Fill with Chicken Force-meat I or II, and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven, basting twice with Thin White Sauce. Remove to serving dish and pour around Thin White Sauce.
Fannie Farmer wrote in cross-references, so this one line assumes you have three other recipes open. Here is what they amount to and where the dish can go wrong.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Thirty minutes is enough to set the forcemeat and finish artichokes that were deliberately left underdone.
- Slightly underdone artichokesLarge globe artichokes take 30-45 minutes boiled or 25-30 minutes steamed until a base leaf pulls free with mild resistance. Pull them a good 10 minutes short of that here, since they finish in the oven.
- Making the cavityAfter boiling, spread the leaves, pull out the pale inner cone and scrape away the hairy choke with a spoon. That is the space the forcemeat fills; each large artichoke takes roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup.
- Chicken force-meatThe book gives two versions; broadly these are quenelle-style mixtures of finely pounded or ground chicken bound with egg white, cream and seasoning. A workable modern equivalent: pulse 8 oz boneless chicken breast cold in a processor with 1 egg white, then work in 1/3 cup cream, salt, pepper and a little nutmeg.
- Cook the stuffing throughIt goes in raw, so the center of the forcemeat should reach 165F. Thirty minutes at 350F generally does it, but check the largest artichoke with an instant-read thermometer rather than trusting the clock.
- Thin white sauceFarmer's thin sauce is 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt. Make about a cup and a half: some for basting, the rest poured around the finished dish.
- Basting mattersThe recipe calls for twice, and it is worth doing: exposed forcemeat dries and cracks in a dry oven, and the sauce helps keep the leaf tips from scorching. A shallow dish with a little of the sauce in the bottom helps as well.
- YieldOne artichoke per person as a first course. The quantities above will fill about three large globes, four if you stuff them lightly.
The globe artichoke reached American tables largely through French cooking and, later, through Italian immigrant gardeners in California, where commercial planting took hold in the early twentieth century -- after this book was written; before that it was a greenhouse and market-garden luxury on the East Coast. Farmer's treatment follows French practice: an artichoke bottom or a hollowed head filled with a quenelle-style forcemeat and napped with a flour-thickened white sauce is familiar nineteenth-century service. The Boston Cooking School approach shows in the bookkeeping rather than the dish, since every component is a separate numbered recipe elsewhere in the volume, to be combined by reference.