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Artichokes Hearts

Artichokes hearts served on buttered toast with a Hollandaise sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and horseradish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Artichokes Hearts

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the artichokes

  1. Heat the artichoke hearts in a saucepan with butter, pepper, and salt until the juice is nearly gone.

  2. Serve hot on buttered toast.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine onion, peppers, bay leaf, flour, and butter in a saucepan for the Hollandaise sauce.

  2. Moisten with stock and mix well.

  3. Cook for 25 minutes, then strain.

  4. Beat the egg yolks with lemon juice, then gradually add to the sauce without boiling.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce hot around the artichoke hearts on toast.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Artichoke + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + chickentop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Artichoke + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the artichokes and the sauce base.
Flour
Its starch thickens the stock into a smooth, body-rich sauce base.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and hold it together as a creamy emulsion.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the rich, buttery sauce.
Chicken or beef stock
Provides the liquid base and savory flavor for the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the sauce. Egg yolks scramble and curdle when overheated, so the sauce must stay below boiling while the yolk mixture is stirred in gradually to keep it smooth and thick.

Swap the horseradish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, butter, pepper, onion, flour, chicken, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, butter, pepper, onion, flour, chicken, egg. 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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