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Artichoke Bottoms with Chestnuts

A baked dish of artichoke bottoms topped with roasted chestnuts and a cream mixture, finished with fried bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Artichoke and chestnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Artichoke Bottoms with Chestnuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the chestnuts

  1. Heat the tin of artichoke bottoms.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the liquor from the tin, chestnuts, and white stock.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil. Add the butter.

  4. Simmer gently until the liquid is absorbed.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place one chestnut on each artichoke bottom.

  2. Pass the remaining chestnuts through a sieve. Mix the sieved chestnuts with cream.

  3. Reheat the mixture.

  4. Pour the cream mixture over the chestnuts on the artichoke bottoms. Sprinkle with fried bread crumbs.

  5. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1-2 minutes before serving.

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 + chestnuttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Chestnut + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together191 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Artichoke + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together175 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts
Provide the bulk of the filling, adding starchy body and a mildly sweet, nutty flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the chestnut mixture a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Thick cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the sieved chestnut purée smooth and rich.
White stock
Supplies liquid that the chestnuts absorb as they simmer, carrying savoury flavour into the filling.

The step that matters

Simmering until the liquid is absorbed. Simmering gently lets the chestnuts soak up the liquid and soften evenly. Boiling hard can break them up and leave the filling watery or uneven, so the mixture should be watched until it is just absorbed.

Swap the chestnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, butter, cream, bread):

  1. Chestnutthe original
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Lentilsfits less well
  4. Pistachiofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, butter, cream, bread. 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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