Home › Vegetables › Artichokes Boiled
Artichokes Boiled
When small and tender, the artichoke may be served raw as a salad. It consists of three parts, the bottom, leaves and choke. The choke is not eaten and may be removed or not, as preferred. If it is to be removed, cut out the stem and save it; then with the point of a sharp knife cut around the base of the choke and draw the latter out. Cut across the top of the artichoke to trim it. Then wash it and soak it for half an hour in salted water, using one tablespoon of salt to two quarts of water. It will then be ready to cook. After removing the choke and soaking as directed, press the stem back into the head, lay the whole head downward in a kettle and cover with boiling water, adding one teaspoon of salt and two of lemon juice for every two quarts of water. Boil gently for half an hour, if the vegetable is young-ten minutes longer, if old. Then take the artichoke from the water and drain. Serve hot with béchamel sauce or sauce Hollandaise, or cold with a French dressing.
A straightforward globe artichoke, boiled whole, from the era when the choke was routinely dug out before cooking rather than after. A few of the instructions repay attention.
- The vegetable in questionThis is the globe artichoke -- the flower bud of Cynara scolymus -- not the Jerusalem artichoke, which is a tuber and appears elsewhere in books of this period. The "bottom" is the fleshy base, the "choke" the hairy immature florets above it.
- Coring before cooking is the hard wayExcavating the choke from a raw bud with a knife point is fiddly and wasteful; on a cooked artichoke the choke lifts out in one tuft with a spoon. If you core it raw, do it after trimming the leaves so you have a flat surface to work through.
- Acidulated water is not optionalCut artichoke browns quickly. The lemon juice in the cooking water helps keep the flesh pale; the recipe gives no reason for the half-hour salted soak, which in books of this period is as often meant to clean the bud as to preserve its colour.
- Aluminium and cast ironArtichokes react with bare aluminium and unlined iron and turn slate-coloured. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Head downwardCooking head down, stem-end up, keeps the bud submerged. Weight it with a plate if it bobs.
- TimingThirty minutes at a gentle boil is right for a medium bud; forty for a large or older one. Test by pulling an outer leaf -- it should come away with slight resistance. The base should take a knife tip with no crunch.
- Salt quantitiesOne tablespoon of salt to two quarts for the soak, one teaspoon to two quarts for the boil. The soak is deliberately much saltier; do not carry the larger figure over into the cooking water.
- Yield and servingOne artichoke per person as a first course. Béchamel and hollandaise are the book's hot suggestions; drawn butter with lemon does the same work. Set out a bowl for discarded leaves.
The globe artichoke reached American tables largely through French cookery and through Italian immigrant growers in California, where commercial planting around the Half Moon Bay area began early, though the large commercial trade developed later and in 1911 the artichoke was still an uncommon item. Its presence in The Butterick Cook Book (1911), with béchamel and hollandaise offered as the default accompaniments, marks it as a genteel and faintly French item rather than an everyday one -- the sort of dish a magazine publisher's cookbook included to show a reader how to manage something she might meet at a good table but had perhaps never cooked. The suggestion that the choke be removed before boiling -- the recipe itself leaves it optional, to be removed or not as preferred -- is often traced to nineteenth-century French practice, where the trimmed bud was said to be destined for stuffing or braising; the modern habit of serving the artichoke whole and letting the diner dig out the choke at the plate is the later and easier convention.