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To Dress Cardoons, or Chardons

Boiled and fried cardoons served with sauce or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cardoon and lemon 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 ↓

To Dress Cardoons, or Chardons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cardoons

  1. Cut cardoons into 6-inch pieces and scrape them like asparagus.

  2. Tie the cardoons in bundles.

  3. Boil the cardoons until tender.

Fry and serve

  1. In a pan, melt butter and add flour.

  2. Fry the cardoons until brown.

  3. Serve with a rich brown sauce.

  4. Alternatively, boil the cardoons in salted water.

  5. Dry the cardoons.

  6. Dip the cardoons in batter.

  7. Fry the cardoons until crisp.

  8. Serve with melted butter.

Stew with marrow

  1. For another option, parboil the cardoons.

  2. Stew the cardoons in brown or white gravy.

  3. Add cayenne, lemon juice, and salt.

  4. Thicken the gravy with butter and flour.

  5. Boil a marrow bone.

  6. Cut the marrow into slices.

  7. Sprinkle the marrow slices over the top of the cardoons.

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. Cardoon + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cardoon + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Butter
Adds richness and browning when melted and fried, and enriches the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the gravy and helps the fried cardoons form a crisp coating.
Marrow bone
Its rich marrow fat is spread over the cardoons to add savoury richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the cardoons until crisp. Cardoons must be fully tender before frying, since frying only browns and crisps the outside. Drying them well first matters because surface moisture steams the batter instead of letting it crisp.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cardoon, butter, flour. 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.

More cardoon recipes

Stew 6Salad 5Garnish 3

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