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Cardoons for Garnish
Select white and sound cardoons, cut them into lengths of three inches each, remove all the prickly part from the sides, plunge them into a basin of water and blanch for twenty minutes. Take them out, rub off the skin, put them on a wire sieve over a mixture made with flour, clarified broth-fat and stock; then add one onion, two cloves, one faggot, a little pepper and salt to suit taste and a few slices of lemon minus the pips. Place the pan on the side of the fire and simmer gently until done. Remove, drain, and they are then ready for use.
This is a component recipe, not a dish: cardoons cooked in a blanc so they stay pale, ready to be crumbed, gratinated or set around a joint. The whole point is keeping them white and getting them tender, which takes longer than the text implies.
- The hinge: acid and no airCut cardoon oxidises to rust-brown within minutes. Keep the cut lengths under water with lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and keep them submerged in the cooking liquid.
- Buying themSold as cardoons, cardi or carduni, mostly late autumn through winter at Italian and Middle Eastern grocers. They look like overgrown grey-green celery. Choose firm, pale ribs; the darker outer stalks are stringy and best discarded.
- "Remove all the prickly part"Trim the spiny edges with a knife, then strip the stringy outer skin from the convex side with a vegetable peeler, as you would tough celery. This is the tedious part and it cannot be skipped.
- Blanch for twenty minutesThis first boiling in plain water is only a preliminary; it loosens the skin and takes off some bitterness. The pieces will still be firm.
- Clarified broth-fat and faggotBroth-fat is the fat skimmed from stock and strained — substitute clarified butter or a mild oil. A faggot is a tied bundle of herbs: parsley stems, thyme, bay. The flour, fat and stock together make a blanc, a slack white cooking liquor whose flour clouds the liquid and shields the vegetable from the air. Reckon roughly a tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of fat per quart of stock, whisked smooth cold before heating so it does not lump.
- "On the side of the fire"A bare simmer on low heat, barely trembling. Cover with a round of parchment to keep the tops under.
- Real cooking timeTwenty minutes of blanching plus the vague "until done" hides a long job. Expect 45 minutes to an hour and a half in the blanc, depending on age and thickness; test with a knife tip, which should meet no resistance. Undercooked cardoon is woody and stubbornly bitter.
- Quantity and holdingCooked cardoons keep three or four days refrigerated in their strained cooking liquid, and reheat well in butter, in a cream gratin, or floured and fried.
Cardoons are Cynara cardunculus, the same species as the globe artichoke but grown for its thick leaf ribs rather than its flower buds — a cultivated thistle, eaten around the Mediterranean since antiquity and long a winter staple in Italy, Provence and Spain. They were familiar enough to appear without explanation here. The cooking method, the blanc, is standard classical practice for any vegetable that browns on contact with air — cardoons, salsify, artichoke bottoms — and the flour in the liquor does the work that lemon and a lidded pan do in a modern kitchen. Cardoon has a second, unrelated career worth noting: the dried flowers are traditionally used as a vegetable rennet for certain Iberian sheep's-milk cheeses.