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Artichokes a LA Sauce Blanche

A dish of boiled artichokes topped with a thickened white sauce made from milk, wheatmeal, egg, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 Sauce Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Peel the artichokes and boil them in water until tender.

  2. Cut the artichokes into slices about 1 inch thick and place them on a dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the milk and wheatmeal, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  2. Cook the sauce until it thickens, then remove it from the heat.

  3. Beat the egg with the lemon juice and add both to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the artichokes and 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Artichoke + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together466 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Artichoke + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Artichokes
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled.
Wheatmeal
Thickens the milk into a smooth white sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Egg
Enriches the sauce and adds body and richness to its texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Add the egg and lemon juice off the heat. Egg proteins set and can curdle or scramble when exposed to high heat, so the sauce should be removed from the heat before the beaten egg and lemon juice are stirred in.

“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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