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Artichokes with Hollandaise Sauce

Artichokes cooked with lemon and baking soda, served with a butter‑based Hollandaise sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 636 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Artichokes with Hollandaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Trim the artichokes and cut off the ends of the leaves.

  2. Soak the artichokes in cold salted water for 40 minutes.

  3. Drain the artichokes.

Cook the artichokes

  1. Cook the artichokes in boiling salted water with lemon juice and baking soda until tender.

  2. Check tenderness by pulling off the leaves easily.

  3. Drain the cooked artichokes.

  4. Remove the soft part from the center of the artichokes.

  5. Reheat the artichokes in boiling water.

Make the Hollandaise sauce

  1. Wash the butter for the Hollandaise sauce.

  2. Divide the butter into three pieces.

  3. In a saucepan, combine one piece of butter with lemon juice and seasonings.

  4. Place the saucepan in a larger one with boiling water.

  5. Stir constantly until the butter melts.

  6. Add the second piece of butter.

  7. Add the third piece of butter as the mixture thickens.

  8. Add boiling water.

  9. Cook for one minute, stirring constantly.

Serve

  1. Serve the artichokes on a napkin with Hollandaise sauce.

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. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Artichoke + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together893 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Artichokes
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when cooked in boiling water.
Butter
Melts into the sauce to give it richness and a smooth, silky body.
Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and thicken the sauce as it is gently heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps stabilize the emulsion.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's pH, which helps the artichoke leaves soften.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and heating the Hollandaise over gentle heat. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot. Gentle indirect heat from the water bath, with constant stirring, lets the yolks thicken into a smooth emulsion instead of curdling.

“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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