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Cardoons Preserved

A preserved cardoon recipe using water, flour, salt, lemon juice, and cold boiled water for canning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cardoon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 33 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cardoons Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cardoons

  1. Prepare and clean the cardoons, cutting them to equal size and draining them.

  2. In a saucepan, bring 1 gallon of water to a boil.

Blanch and pack

  1. Dilute 2 tablespoons of flour in cold water, then add to the boiling water along with ¼ teaspoon salt and the juice of 2 lemons. Stir until it boils to avoid lumps.

  2. Add the cardoons and cook until tender.

  3. Remove from heat and let the cardoons cool.

  4. Dip each piece in lukewarm water and place in quart tin cans.

  5. Cover with cold boiled water and lightly salt.

Seal and cook

  1. Seal the cans and cook in a hot water bath for 2 hours.

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. Lemon + cardoontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Flour + cardoontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cardoons
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when cooked and then preserved in the cans.
Flour
Thickens the cooking water into a light coating that helps keep the cardoons pale and smooth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps keep the cardoons light in colour and gives a bright flavour.

The step that matters

Stir the flour mixture until it boils. Flour added to hot liquid clumps quickly unless it is stirred well, and lumps would spoil the smooth cooking liquid and its even coating on the cardoons.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, cardoon):

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, cardoon. 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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