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Artichokes with Butter
(Carciofi al burro) Wash, dry and cut out the top of the leaves of as many artichokes as are needed. Cut them in two or four and boil them in salt water. When tender, drain them, have them slightly browned in melted butter and season with salt and pepper.
When served in a vegetable dish or placed in a pyramid on a round plate, sprinkle with grated cheese. 32
A four-line vegetable dish that assumes you already know how to butcher an artichoke. Almost everything that can go wrong here happens before the pot.
- The hinge: remove the chokeThe original says only to cut out the tops of the leaves and never mentions the choke; the small artichokes picked young in Italy may have little or none. A supermarket globe artichoke does. Once you have halved or quartered it, scrape out the hairy centre with a spoon before boiling, or the finished dish is unpleasant to eat.
- Trimming and discolourationSnap off the tough outer leaves, pare the stem and the base with a knife, and drop each piece into water with lemon juice as you go. Cut artichoke browns within minutes.
- Boiling timeQuartered globe artichokes take roughly 15-25 minutes in well-salted water depending on size; test the base with a knife tip rather than watching the clock. Undercooked artichoke will not soften later in the butter.
- Drain them properlySet the pieces cut side down on a towel for a few minutes. Water clinging in the leaves will steam rather than brown when they hit the butter, and the butter will spit.
- "Slightly browned in melted butter"A wide skillet over medium heat, pieces laid cut side down in a single layer, three or four minutes a side. Crowding the pan is the difference between browned and stewed.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in an Italian book of this date most likely means Parmigiano-Reggiano or a hard grating pecorino. The recipe has it sprinkled on at the moment of serving, off the heat.
- YieldFigure one medium globe artichoke per person as a side dish, two if it is standing as a light course on its own.
The recipe comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of a run of early twentieth-century American volumes aimed at cooks curious about Italian food but working from an English-language kitchen. Artichokes had long been a fixture of central and southern Italian cooking, and Rome in particular is associated with them, though the cultivated globe artichoke is generally traced to Arab-influenced horticulture in Sicily and North Africa before spreading north through Naples in the fifteenth century. The stray "32" at the end appears to be a page or recipe number from the original printing, not part of the instructions.