Skip to main content
Main

Artichokes with Italian Sauce

Artichokes simmered with lemon, butter, and a thin white Italian sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Artichokes with Italian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Cut the artichokes into six pieces and trim off the green leaves and outside.

  2. Remove the chokes and trim the tops of the remaining leaves.

  3. Rub the white parts with lemon juice.

  4. Soak the artichokes in salt water.

  5. Drain the artichokes.

Blanch and simmer

  1. Blanch in hot water with lemon juice and butter for 10 minutes.

  2. Place the artichokes in a stewpan, seasoning with pepper, salt, and chopped parsley.

  3. Pour the thin white Italian sauce over the artichokes and simmer on moderate heat until done.

Finish the sauce

  1. Drain the artichokes, skim and reduce the sauce, then add a little lemon juice and coat the bottoms of the artichokes.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Artichoke + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together636 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Artichoke + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together524 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Artichokes
Are the main vegetable; their tender bases and leaves become the dish once trimmed and cooked.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded flavour to the blanching liquid.
Thin white italian sauce
Coats the artichokes and carries the flavour of the finished dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the cut artichokes pale.

The step that matters

Rubbing and soaking the cut artichokes. Cut artichoke surfaces darken quickly as their natural compounds oxidise on contact with air. Rubbing with lemon juice and soaking in salt water slows this discolouration, so the pieces stay pale for serving.

“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