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Baked Cardoons with Breadcrumbs
Blanch and boil a sufficient number of cardoons; place them on a dish well buttered and sprinkled with grated bread, cover them with breadcrumbs, pour over sufficient warm butter to moisten, and brown the surface either with a salamander or in the oven. When done, take out the cardoons, and serve. A little grated cheese may also be sprinkled over with the breadcrumbs. Cardoons, Spanish Style Secure some very white heads of cardoons, cut each leaf into slices six inches in length (with the exception of the hollow ones which are tough and thready), and remove all the prickles. Place the thickest leaves in a saucepan of boiling water, and boil them for a few minutes, then put in the leaves of the heart, turn the middle stalks into olive shapes, put them into the boiling water, and blanch them also; try a piece in cold water to see whether the slime which is on the surface will come off by rubbing; if so, take them off the fire immediately, refresh them in cold water, wash and rub this all off. Prepare a sauce as follow: Cut about half a pound of fat bacon, and a small piece of beef suet into large squares; put these into a saucepan with two ounces of butter, half a lemon cut into thin slices, a small lump of salt, and as much water as may be necessary to cover the cardoons when they are added. Stew this for half an hour, then throw in the cardoons and boil them up once, and leave in. When read to use the cardoons, trim them at both ends, put them in a stewpan with one teacupful each of Spanish sauce and broth, and a small quantity of both sugar and salt; then boil over a sharp fire so as not to cook them too much, keeping the fat well skimmed off. When cooked arrange the cardoons on a hot dish, strain the sauce over them, and serve without delay.
Two cardoon preparations run together on the page: a simple buttered gratin, and a long braise in bacon-and-suet liquor finished with espagnole. Both assume you know how to get a raw cardoon edible, which is where most of the work is.
- The hinge: cook them long enough"Blanch and boil a sufficient number" hides the real labour. Trimmed cardoon stalks generally want something like 30 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer before they are tender, depending on age and thickness; undercooked, they stay woody and bitter no matter what sauce goes over them. Test with a knife tip, not a clock.
- TrimmingStrip the leafy edges and the spines, then peel the strings off the outer face of each rib with a vegetable peeler as you would celery. The "hollow ones" the text sets aside are presumably the coarser, pithy ribs -- it says only that they are tough and thready; the pale heart is the prize.
- DiscolourationCut cardoon discolours quickly. Drop the pieces into water sharpened with lemon juice as you work, and cook them in a blanc — water with a little flour whisked in plus lemon — to keep them pale. The lemon slices in the recipe's braising liquor may well serve the same purpose.
- The slime testThe instruction to rub a boiled piece in cold water is real and worth following. Cardoons release a viscous coating during blanching; if it rubs away easily, they have had enough of the first boil and can be refreshed and cleaned.
- SalamanderIn this kitchen a salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the dish to glaze the top. Use the broiler, 3 to 4 inches from the element, for 2 to 3 minutes. Otherwise a hot oven at 425F will brown the crumbs in about 10 minutes.
- Spanish sauceEspagnole — brown stock thickened with a dark roux and flavoured with mirepoix and tomato. A teacupful is usually reckoned at roughly 5 to 6 fl oz. A good reduced brown veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, stands in without much loss.
- The bacon and suet liquorHalf a pound of fat bacon plus suet makes a rich holding bath rather than a sauce; the cardoons sit in it until wanted, which is service-kitchen logic. Cooking them in salted stock with butter and lemon gives much the same result for a home meal.
- "Turn into olive shapes"Tourné cuts — the middle stalks pared into small barrel or olive forms so they cook evenly and look uniform on the plate. Even lengths of 2 to 3 inches do the job.
- YieldNeither version gives a quantity. A large head may give something in the region of a pound of trimmed stalk after peeling, enough for three or four as a side dish.
Cardoon is the same species as the globe artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, grown for its thick leaf ribs rather than its flower bud, and usually earthed up or wrapped in the field to blanch the stalks white — hence the insistence on "very white heads." It is a winter vegetable of the northern Mediterranean, familiar in Piedmont, Provence and Spain, and it appears here in the French repertoire of a New York luxury hotel kitchen; the elaborate second preparation, with its espagnole and its skimmed bacon liquor, is brigade cooking. Cardoons largely dropped out of American markets in the twentieth century and are now found chiefly in Italian and Spanish groceries in late autumn and winter.