Boring? We Thought It Would Be - 260 Year Old Artichoke Recipe

welcome to 18th century cooking I'm your host John Townsend today we'll be using an ingredient we have never used before on the channel artichokes thanks for joining us as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century [Music] artichokes show up in a lot of different recipe books English recipe books from the 18th century a lot of these recipes are very very similar this one's mostly based on the recipe here in Hana glasses cookbook the art of cookery this one really is sort of the stable if you're only going to get one 18th century cookbook this is probably the one to get this recipe is pretty simple except it really doesn't tell you what to do with artichokes so that's that's where we're gonna start let me read to you her recipe this one's really easy in the recipe at least not necessarily in the doing to fry artichokes first blanch them in water then flour them fry them in fresh butter lay them in your dish pour melted butter over them or you may put in a little red wine into the butter and season with nutmeg pepper and salt so right super super simple but it's not that simple because what really happens is what the hard part is what happens before you do anything in this recipe you can't just take this artichoke and do exactly what she says and turn out with anything very edible because the inside of the artichoke is like a little hairball it's the choke of the artichoke we got to take that out and these outer leaves there if you try to eat them it's like like trying to eat rope so let's prepare these let's get these cut down to what we can actually work with so let's start to prepare these artichokes we need to get them sort of cut up and get the external layer off of here now before I start cutting this one of the tricks with artichokes is the fact that at when you cut them if you let them set in the open air they start to turn black and do strange color things so to keep them from doing that and I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it but we're gonna have a bath of water and a lemon more to squeeze a little lemon juice in there so that that protects them from discoloring too much so let's squeeze a lemon in there let's cut off the very end of the stem you don't want to cut off all the stem because there's good stuff inside the stem but we'll cut off the the last half inch on this one and let's get rid of these excess leaves that are just easy to get rid of we can basically cut the very top of this all the tips of these leaves some of them have almost like a thorn at the end of them we want to get rid of the tips of all the leaves so let's just cut off the first inch here okay so you can already see because I'm using a non stainless steel knife it starts to turn color here so we get this sort of black color I'm not gonna be able to do too much about that 18th century knives were carbon steel and carbon steel reacts with the chemicals inside of this but we can see that we've gotten rid of most of this outside we can also just sort of cut away this outer these outer leaves let me dump this to keep it from discoloring we're trying to get down to these nice yellow leaves now let's make sure to get that the very outer skin off of this stem so we don't want that but we do want what's inside the stem so this sort of fibrous exterior we're going to take off so these are all ready they're all trimmed up it's time to put them in boiling water the Hana glass recipe says to just blanch them and blanch them just means put them in the boiling water for a very short period of time I've got a different recipe book here this is Richard Briggs in the art of the English cookery and this one it's a little bit later recipe and he goes into a little bit more explanation about artichokes and in this one he says boil them till they're tender they're definitely more than just blanching going on with this particular recipe and I'm gonna go ahead and let these boil for a little bit I'm not sure how long it takes to get them to be tender I've never really worked that much with artichokes especially this kind of recipe before so I'm gonna let these boil for you know 15 or 20 minutes and some recipes I think even call for boiling an hour hour and a half not necessarily for frying them but you know I think I'm pretty safe and letting them boil for a little bit of time before we cut these up the ones I've eaten before they can be pretty tough so I'm gonna I'm gonna let them get tender and this can be some of the fun of interpreting these recipes you got a look at a bunch of different recipes figure out what's going on what can go wrong and it may take three or four or five tries at a recipe like this before you get it like you really wanted these are really made as suggestions they aren't not complete directions so you learn as you go now that these are out of the water let's go ahead and cut them in half and they're definitely softer once we get them cut in half we've got this final little part that we have to do we're gonna cut them in quarters also but we need to cut the choke out and let's look at the inside here now that we've got this cut in half we can see this these this hairy part in here now this may not taste bad but it's got a texture that we don't like sort of like the outside might not taste bad but it's gonna texture like rope this sections like a little hairball in there and we're going to cut this out but we don't want to cut too far down into the flesh underneath that because that's some of the very best part of the artichoke so we're just going to very carefully cut all these little little hair sections out now we want these to dry off so I'm going to take my quarters because we're gonna be frying them we don't want too much moisture there take these guys set them on here get them to dry off a little bit let's set these aside now let's make the flour that we're gonna dredge these in and then we can start to fry them just got some unbleached flour got some salt and pepper just gonna add that some just black pepper I like pepper so we're gonna put a lot of that in there final ingredient I'm gonna put a nutmeg in here I know you think it's a joke but it's not Briggs's recipe definitely puts nutmeg on top of of these guys and he puts these spices inside the flour some of them put the spices on afterwards we're gonna put these spices right here in our flowering so when we fry it it fries the flavor right Ian [Music] our artichokes are ready they've been fried up nice and brown which is what the directions called for I'm not sure how to eat these or what utensil to use so I think I'm just gonna go ahead and pick them up to try them and I just know from experience that this this very outside edge probably isn't the best part so we'll just take a chunk out of the middle here leave behind those very outside outside leaves that was a big bite mmm really really good it kind of reminds me this time of year this is a time of year we go out and we hunt morel mushrooms fry them up just like this well it reminds me of that they've got a wonderful sweet flavor to them and there's we can eat basically the stem is all good once we skin that and especially this very this bass is some of the very very best part of it so good so good mmm who would have thought these weird they're actually related to um thistles so who would guess it you could go out and fry up these thistles giant thistle heads in butter they taste great if you get a chance to try something like this you will definitely enjoy it such a wonderful recipe again if you're interested the art of cookery by Hannah glasse you can find that on our website and if you're interested in other similar videos check out this herring and greens video so good

Channel: Townsends

Views: 210,789

Rating: 4.964745 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, artichoke, artichoke recipes, artichoke hearts, artichoke benefits, fried, fry, fr

Id: e2LqoIWdAlE

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Mon May 20 2019