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Puree of Cardoons
Remove the prickles from some white and sound cardoons, blanch them in water for fifteen or twenty minutes, rub off the skins, cut them in three-inch lengths, and put them on a wire drainer in an oval stewpan; lay on the top some thin slices of bacon (fat) and cover them with a white dressing made of flour, stock and clarified fat; add one onion, stuck with two cloves, some slices of peeled and seeded lemon, and a little salt and pepper. Allow these to simmer until the cardoons are done, then pour in an equal quantity of bechamel sauce, reduce and press the mixture through a tammy-cloth. Before serving add butter and raw cream to the puree.
A classic French blanc treatment of cardoons, written for a brigade that had stock, bechamel and clarified fat standing ready. The technique survives intact; only the vocabulary and the equipment need translating.
- The hinge: keep them whiteCardoons oxidize to a dull grey-brown the moment they are cut. Drop the trimmed pieces into acidulated water immediately. The "white dressing" of flour, stock and clarified fat works much like the classical blanc, a flour-thickened bath that helps keep pale vegetables from darkening; the lemon slices in the pan serve the same end. Skip it and the puree turns the colour of wet cardboard.
- Trimming"Remove the prickles" understates the job. Cut off the leaves and any hollow or hard outer ribs, then string the stalks with a vegetable peeler as you would celery; the fibres run the length of the rib and will not soften. The initial fifteen-to-twenty-minute blanch loosens the skin, as the recipe says, but is nowhere near full cooking.
- Real cooking timeAfter blanching, cardoons need roughly one to two hours of gentle simmering depending on age and thickness. "Until the cardoons are done" means a knife slides through with no resistance; anything short of that leaves fibrous threads that no sieve will remove.
- Wire drainer and oval stewpanThe drainer is simply a rack that keeps the cardoons off the pan floor so they poach rather than scorch. Any trivet or folded rack in a wide, deep saucepan does the same. An oval pan suits long cut lengths, though such pans were standard kitchen equipment in any case.
- Tammy-clothA tammy is a tight worsted cloth through which cooks forced puree with a wooden spoon, or by twisting the loaded cloth. A food mill followed by a pass through a fine chinois gives the same texture with a fraction of the labour; a blender works too, but still strain afterward, since cardoon fibre is stubborn.
- Clarified fat and baconThe fat is clarified so it stays neutral and pale; clarified butter is the obvious modern stand-in. The bacon should be fat, unsmoked salt pork or fatback rather than the sweet-cured smoked bacon sold today, which would push the flavour off entirely.
- Bechamel and reductionThe recipe does not say what the bechamel is equal to; the cooking liquid is the likelier reading, though the cardoon itself is possible. Either way it is a great deal of sauce, so reduce it hard as instructed, or the finished puree will be a soup; the target is a thick spoonable mass that holds a ridge.
- "Raw cream"In period usage this points to fresh uncooked cream stirred in off the heat rather than to any deliberate call for unpasteurized dairy, though in 1896 the cream to hand would have been unpasteurized. Use pasteurized heavy cream and add it with the butter away from the flame so the puree stays glossy rather than breaking.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities; reckon on about a pound of trimmed cardoon and its sauce for four to six as a side. It belongs beside roast beef, veal or game, in the same slot a celery-root or salsify puree would occupy.
Cardoons are Cynara cardunculus, the same species as the globe artichoke but grown for its thick leaf ribs rather than its flower bud, and they have been a winter vegetable of Provence, Piedmont and Spain for centuries. They reached American tables mainly through French-trained hotel kitchens, which is precisely why the dish appears here: Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel who lent his name to this 1896 book, was cataloguing the Waldorf's repertoire, and that repertoire was Escoffier-era French almost line for line. The blanc, the studded onion, the tammy-cloth and the finishing butter and cream are all standard classical procedure. Cardoons never took hold in the general American market, and the vegetable remains a specialty item today, sold in late autumn and winter and often still blanched in the field under wrapping to keep the ribs pale and tender.