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To Fry Artichokes

A dish of artichokes coated in flour and fried in butter, finished with melted butter, optional red wine, nutmeg, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 156 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Fry Artichokes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and fry

  1. Blanch the artichokes in water.

  2. Coat them in flour.

  3. Fry them in fresh butter until golden.

Finish and serve

  1. Place them in a dish and pour melted butter over them.

  2. Optionally, add a little red wine to the melted butter and season with nutmeg, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together156 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Artichokes
Are the main ingredient, cooked by blanching and then frying.
Flour
Coats the artichokes so they brown and crisp when fried.
Fresh butter
Fries the artichokes to a golden colour and adds rich flavour.
Red wine
Optionally adds acidity and depth to the melted butter sauce.

The step that matters

Frying in butter until golden. Butter browns at a lower temperature than oil and can burn before the coating is crisp. Keeping the heat moderate lets the flour coating brown evenly while the artichoke heats through.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, flour, butter, red wine, pepper):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, flour, butter, red wine, 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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