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Artichoke Bottoms
Open a pint can fresh artichokes with a can opener (there are usually six artichokes to a can). After draining off the water dry the artichokes on a cloth. Heat well half ounce clarified butter in a frying pan, place the artichokes in the pan and cook them for three minutes on each side and see that they obtain a good colour. Remove them with a skimmer and use as directed.
A component recipe rather than a finished dish: canned artichoke bottoms browned in butter to be used as edible cups or a garnish base. The whole thing hinges on getting them dry.
- Dry them properlyCanned bottoms hold brine in every crevice, and wet artichoke steams instead of browning. Blot them on both sides and let them sit on the cloth a few minutes before they meet the fat, or the three minutes a side will give you pale, floppy discs.
- Half ounce clarified butterAbout one tablespoon. Clarified butter is specified because the milk solids in whole butter scorch before the artichoke colours; ghee works, as does a mix of butter and a neutral oil.
- What a pint can wasTwo cups if the pint is American, 20 fl oz if imperial; the text does not say which. Six pieces to the can suggests bottoms or large hearts, not the quartered baby hearts sold today. Look for tinned or jarred artichoke bottoms, sold whole and trimmed flat; frozen quartered hearts will not hold a filling.
- Packed in water, not oilThe instruction to drain off "the water" assumes a plain brine or water pack. Modern jars marinated in oil, vinegar and herbs will fight whatever sauce you were planning; buy the plain kind.
- Heat level"Heat well" implies a fairly brisk pan; medium-high is a reasonable modern reading. The artichokes are already cooked, so the three minutes a side is for colour and to drive off moisture, not to tenderise anything.
- A skimmerA flat perforated skimmer or spider. A slotted spoon does the same job; the point is to lift them out without dragging butter along, since they are usually going straight into a sauce or under a filling.
- "Use as directed"The book expects you to have come here from another recipe. Browned bottoms are a classic base for poached eggs, creamed sweetbreads, mushroom puree or foie gras, or a garnish laid around a roast. The book gives no yield; the can holds six pieces.
Artichoke bottoms — the fleshy base left when the leaves and choke are stripped away — were a staple of French professional garnish work, where fonds d'artichauts appear less as a vegetable in their own right than as small edible platforms for something richer. That may be why this entry gives no seasoning and ends with "use as directed": it reads like a preparation from the garnish station. Its presence in a general household cookbook of the period says something about canning. Tinned artichokes let a cook far from the Mediterranean produce a dish that had until recently required either a kitchen garden or a great deal of paring, and cookbooks of the period cheerfully built restaurant-style garnishes on canned goods that a previous generation would have called out of season.