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Cardoons with Cheese
Take the outside leaves from five cardoons, string the white parts, and cut into small pieces; put in a saucepan with one pint of port wine, cook on a slow fire until tender. Season to taste, and add one ounce of butter rolled in flour. Put the whole in a dish, squeeze over the juice of an orange, and sprinkle over four ounces of grated cheese. Brown the surface with a salamander, or in the oven. Serve as hot as possible.
A gratin of cardoons, the celery-like ribs of a cultivated thistle, braised in port rather than the usual acidulated water. A few points make the difference between tender ribs and something like wet twine.
- Buying cardoonsSold in winter and early spring at Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers, usually as a bundle of grey-green ribs a couple of feet long. Five heads is a great deal of vegetable by modern standards; two large heads will fill a gratin dish for six.
- "String the white parts"This is the hinge. Cardoon ribs carry tough fibres along the outer curve exactly like celery, and they do not soften with cooking. Peel each rib with a vegetable peeler or draw the strings off with a paring knife before cutting into 2-inch lengths.
- DiscolourationCut cardoon browns within minutes. Drop the pieces into water with lemon juice as you work, or the finished dish turns a dull grey under the cheese.
- A pint of port"A pint of port" -- Two cups, and it is genuinely the whole cooking liquid here. Cardoons take 45 minutes to an hour and a half on a low simmer depending on age, so keep the pan covered and top up with water if it runs dry. Blanching the ribs in salted water first and finishing them in a smaller quantity of wine is one way to make the result less aggressively sweet.
- Butter rolled in flourBeurre manie is the modern term: one ounce of butter, about two tablespoons, kneaded with an equal weight of flour and stirred into the simmering liquid to thicken it into a sauce.
- The cheeseFour ounces grated; the recipe does not say which. A hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or a dry Swiss is the likeliest reading, and both brown well; a young melting cheese will slump rather than crust.
- SalamanderAn iron plate on a handle, heated red in the fire and held over the surface to glaze it. A broiler element at full heat, dish set 4 to 6 inches below, does the same work in three or four minutes.
- YieldPerhaps six as a vegetable course at the reduced quantity suggested above; the original gives no yield, and five cardoons would stretch further. It must go to the table straight from the heat, as the original insists.
Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus) are the same species as the globe artichoke, grown for the blanched leaf stalks instead of the flower bud, and they were a standard winter vegetable in France, Spain and northern Italy long before they reached American hotel menus. Their presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a marker of who the Waldorf fed: a vegetable that took an hour of knife work and an hour of braising, sold in bundles at a handful of city markets, made sense only in a kitchen with a large brigade and diners who expected French service. The pairing with port and orange juice belongs to the same nineteenth-century taste that put Madeira in soup and sherry in terrapin, and the salamander named in the last line was still ordinary equipment in a professional range.