Skip to main content
Main

Artichokes a LA Lyonnaise

Sautéed artichokes flavored with butter, wine, sugar, and lemon, served with a brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 a LA Lyonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Trim, quarter, and parboil the artichokes.

  2. Drain them on a sieve.

Braise

  1. Spread a sauté pan thickly with butter and place the artichokes in the pan.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, castor sugar, and white wine.

  3. Moisten with a little stock and let simmer until tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Dress the artichokes on a dish in a circular order.

  2. Add a spoonful of brown sauce, seasoned with sliced onion and a pat of butter to the remaining sauce in the sauté pan.

  3. Flavour with lemon juice.

  4. Boil for a few moments.

  5. Sauce over the dish.

  6. Serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender as they simmer.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the artichokes brown gently in the pan.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that flavour the braising liquid.
Castor sugar
Adds a little sweetness that balances the wine and lemon.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that lifts the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Artichoke pieces need gentle, covered-style simmering in a little liquid until tender; too fast a boil can toughen or break them, and too little liquid lets them scorch before they soften.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, butter, pepper, sugar, white wine, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, butter, pepper, sugar, white wine, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesArtichoke SoupArtichoke Soup55 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes