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Artichokes with Olive Oil

A simple boiled artichoke dish flavored with olive oil, onions, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and artichoke match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 745 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Artichokes with Olive Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Braise

  1. In a suitable pot, combine the water and olive oil.

  2. Add the skinned onions and season with salt and pepper.

  3. Boil until the onions are half cooked.

  4. Add the cleaned artichokes and continue boiling until nearly all the water evaporates.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Olive + artichoketop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together745 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + artichoketop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Artichoke + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Adds fat and flavour, and coats the vegetables as the water cooks away.
Small dry onions
Soften and turn sweeter as they cook in the liquid.
Artichokes
Main vegetable, cooked through in the water and oil until tender.

The step that matters

Boiling until nearly all the water evaporates. As the water boils off, the pot runs dry and the remaining oil gets hotter. Without close attention, the onions and artichokes can scorch on the bottom before they are tender.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, artichoke, pepper):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, artichoke, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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