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Artichokes Barigoule
Cut off about half an inch from the tops of the artichokes, trim off the leaves from the bottom and burn them. Wash thoroughly, put in a saucepan with a good supply of slightly-salted water and boil until quite tender. Take out, drain, and scoop out the slightly fibrous insides, and squeeze perfectly dry. Put the tops of the leaves into a fryingpan with a few tablespoonfuls of oil to fry them. Place a small quantity of grated bacon in a saucepan with a little flour and butter, adding a gill of prepared fine herbs, and pour over a little broth; put the saucepan over the fire and stir for five minutes. Place a small quantity of this mixture in each artichoke (previously seasoned with salt and pepper internally) and cover the opening with a thin slice of bacon, bind around with string to keep them in position, put into a sautepan together with a little broth, set the pan in the oven and bake for twenty minutes. Arrange the cooked leaves on a dish, remove the string and bacon from the arti-chokes, place on the leaves, and serve.
Oscar's method is the classic Provencal treatment compressed into one paragraph: artichokes fully cooked, hollowed, stuffed with a bacon-and-herb forcemeat, then finished in the oven. A few of his terms need decoding before you start.
- "Burn them" is a printer's error"Burn them" is puzzling -- trimming the leaves from the bottom and burning them makes no sense as food, and it reads like a garbled instruction to pare or trim the base. Trim the stem flat, snap off the coarse bottom leaves, and rub the cut surfaces with lemon to stop them blackening. Keep the half-inch leaf tops cut off at the start: they are fried later.
- Don't boil them all the wayThey get twenty more minutes in the oven afterward. Boil only until a leaf pulls free with slight resistance, roughly 20-30 minutes for large globes, or the finished dish collapses into fibre. "Squeeze perfectly dry" means press gently in a towel, not crush.
- GillHalf a cup. A half cup of chopped herbs to a few tablespoons of bacon and flour is a very green stuffing, which is the point of the dish; scale down if your herbs are strong.
- "Prepared fine herbs"Fines herbes: parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, chopped fine. Parsley and chives with a little tarragon is a workable substitute if chervil is unavailable.
- "Grated bacon"Bacon chilled hard and grated, or simply minced very fine, so it renders into the flour and butter as a paste rather than sitting in pieces. Use unsmoked slab bacon or pancetta; modern heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the herbs.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe does not say whether to cover the pan. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for the twenty minutes in a little broth; a loose cover will help keep the tops from drying.
- The fried leavesHe fries the trimmed leaf tops in oil as a bed for the artichokes. They are decorative and mostly inedible on large artichokes -- worth doing only with young ones, whose leaf tips crisp and can actually be eaten.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number. One stuffed artichoke per person as a first course; four is a sensible batch.
Barigoule is generally derived from the Provencal word for a mushroom -- barigoulo or bringoulo, usually identified as the saffron milk cap -- though whether the name came from stuffing artichokes with mushrooms or from cooking them in the manner of mushrooms is disputed. By the nineteenth century versions stuffed with bacon and herbs and braised in broth were common, which is the line Oscar Tschirky is following here. The Waldorf's repertoire was French, and artichokes were still an uncommon vegetable in American markets in the 1890s. The dish survives today mainly in its lighter Provencal form, artichauts a la barigoule, braised in white wine and olive oil.