No. 2648

Cardoon or Celery Salad

Salade de Cardons ou de Celeri

Have one pound of cardoons, remove the stringy outside coat, and cut them into inch-long pieces, then cook them the same as cardoons with half-glaze (No. 2710). When done, drain and fry them in a pan with some oil, adding one clove of garlic, salt and sweet Spanish peppers, and halt a gill of vinegar. Let boil up only once, then lay the cardoons in a salad bowl, pour the liquid over, stir well and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you know how to tame a cardoon before you get here; the cross-reference to No. 2710 is doing most of the work. The salad itself is a quick pan-dressing of already-tender stalks.

The hinge: cardoons must be cooked soft firstRaw or underdone cardoon is fibrous and bitter to the point of inedibility. Peel the strings with a vegetable peeler, drop the pieces straight into acidulated water so they do not blacken, then simmer until a knife slides through with no resistance — usually 45 to 90 minutes depending on age and thickness. Only then do they go into the pan.
"Cook them the same as cardoons with half-glaze"Half-glaze is demi-glace, a reduced brown veal stock; the cross-referenced No. 2710 cooks the cardoons in it, though its text is not reproduced here. For a salad you can simmer them in salted water or light stock instead; the demi-glace version gives a meatier, darker result and is not vegetarian.
Half a gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — a generous amount for a pound of vegetable. Ranhofer does not say which vinegar; wine vinegar is a reasonable choice. Start with half and taste, since the boil-up concentrates it.
Sweet Spanish peppersThis means pimiento — the mild red pepper, either dried and ground as sweet paprika or preserved in a jar. It is a colour and sweetness note, not heat. Modern Spanish pimentón dulce is the closest single product.
"Let boil up only once"The vinegar goes in at the end and comes to a boil for a matter of seconds, just long enough to take the raw edge off and pick up the garlic and pepper from the pan. Reducing it further turns the dressing harsh and dulls the paprika.
The garlic cloveThe recipe calls for one clove and does not say how to treat it; a whole bruised clove left to perfume the oil and then lifted out is one common reading. Mincing it will give a much louder salad.
If you use celery insteadCelery needs nothing like the same treatment: string the ribs, cut to inch lengths, and blanch 3 to 5 minutes until barely tender. Anything longer collapses it. Skip the braise entirely and go straight to the pan.
Yield and servingA pound of trimmed cardoon serves three or four as a side. It is served warm or at room temperature, dressed with its own pan liquid rather than chilled.

A Little History

Cardoon is the same species as the globe artichoke, Cynara cardunculus, grown for its thick leaf ribs rather than its flower buds, and in nineteenth-century America it turns up mainly in high-end and immigrant cooking rather than in general kitchens — Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's, could list it in The Epicurean (1894) as a matter of course and simply cross-reference his own earlier preparation. Its long history in Mediterranean cooking runs through Provence, Piedmont and Spain, and the garlic, oil, paprika and vinegar here point squarely at the Spanish end of that range; the recipe also offers celery as a stand-in. Cardoons never disappeared, but they retreated to Italian and Spanish greengrocers and to Christmas tables in Lyon and Turin, which is why a dish this ordinary in 1894 now reads as obscure.