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Artichokes with Cream

Boiled artichokes served with a sauce of cream, butter, flour, and milk, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 466 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Artichokes with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Scrape the artichokes.

  2. Boil them with salt and cayenne pepper until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the cream, butter, flour, and milk.

  2. Boil to create a sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the artichokes with the cream 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 + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bulb artichokes
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and served with the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and flavor, and helps form the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated in the liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a smooth, mild body.
Cream
Adds fat for a rich, velvety texture in the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil to create a sauce.. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated fully in the liquid. Stirring keeps the sauce smooth and prevents lumps or scorching on the pan bottom, especially with cream, which can scorch if boiled too hard.

“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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