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Stuffed Artichokes
(Carciofi ripieni) Cut the stalk at the base, remove the small outside leaves and wash the artichokes. Then cut the top and open the internal leaves so that you can cut the bottom with a small knife and remove the hairy part if it is there. Keep aside the small interior leaves to put them with the stuffing.
This, if to be used, for example, for six artichokes, must be composed of the above small leaves, 1/8 lb. of ham more lean than fat, one fourth of a small onion, just a taste of garlic, some leaves of celery or parsley, a pinch of dry mushrooms, softened in water, a crumb of bread and a pinch of pepper, but no salt.
First chop the ham, then grind everything together and with the hash fill the artichokes, and put them to cook standing on their stalks in a saucepan with some oil, salt and pepper. Some prefer to give the artichokes a half cooking in water before stuffing it, but it is hardly advisable, because in this way they lose part of their special flavor, 106
A braise, not a bake: the artichokes stand upright in a covered pan with oil and cook in their own steam. The original assumes you know how much liquid and how long, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- The hinge: cook them covered, and give them liquidOil alone will fry the bases before the hearts are tender. Stand the stuffed artichokes upright in a snug saucepan, add the oil plus about half an inch of water or light broth, cover tightly and simmer 35-50 minutes depending on size. They are done when a knife slides into the base with no resistance.
- 1/8 lb. of hamTwo ounces, about 55 g. Use prosciutto crudo or a dry-cured Italian ham rather than wet-brined sandwich ham, which will water down the stuffing.
- "But no salt"That instruction applies to the stuffing only, because the cured ham brings enough. Salt does go into the pan liquid, as the second half of the recipe says.
- Dried mushroomsThe recipe says only "a pinch," softened in water; read it as a few dried porcini, soaked 20 minutes in warm water. Squeeze them out and chop them into the stuffing. The soaking water can be strained into the pan for the braise.
- "A crumb of bread"Roughly a slice of stale crustless bread, torn up; about half a cup of loose crumbs for six artichokes. It binds the hash rather than bulking it out.
- "Grind everything together"In a kitchen of this date that would have meant a mezzaluna, a chopping knife or a hand mincer. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same, but stop while the mixture still has texture; a paste will pack into the artichoke and steam into a dense plug.
- Trimming and browningCut artichokes discolour within minutes. Have a bowl of water with lemon juice ready and drop each one in as you finish it, then drain well before stuffing so the oil does not spit.
- Choke and stalkSmall young Italian artichokes have no developed choke, which is why the recipe says "if it is there." With supermarket globes, spread the leaves and dig the fuzz out with a teaspoon or a melon baller. Trim the stalk flat so each one sits level and stays upright.
- YieldSix artichokes, one apiece as a first course or side; the stuffing quantities scale directly.
The Italian Cook Book (Maria Gentile, 1919) was one of the earliest English-language attempts to put everyday Italian home cooking in front of American readers, and it draws heavily on the tradition codified by Pellegrino Artusi in La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (first published 1891), the collection that shaped Italian domestic cookery for a century. The stray "106" at the end of this entry comes from the printed source and is most likely a page reference; what it refers to cannot be established from the text alone. Artichokes had been cultivated in Italy from at least the fifteenth century and by the nineteenth were a defining vegetable of Roman and Tuscan cooking, cheap and abundant in spring, with the small purple varieties often tender enough that the choke needed no removing. What is most telling here is the closing opinion: the warning against par-boiling before stuffing, on the grounds that the artichoke loses "part of its special flavor," records the kind of disagreement between cooks that this literature often preserves, and it suggests a cuisine already treating vegetables as worth respecting on their own terms rather than merely softening into submission.