Skip the fresh heart and reach for the jarred one: that single choice is what separates a working artichoke sandwich from a watery disappointment. A fresh heart is firm, faintly bitter, and watery; the marinated heart has been cooked down and steeped in oil, lemon, and herb until it is tender, glossy, and savoury enough to anchor a sandwich on its own. That is the defining element: quartered marinated artichoke hearts, oil still clinging to them, laid into a split crusted loaf. The bread is usually left plain or barely buttered, because the oil the artichoke carries is already the sandwich's fat.
The craft is the Mediterranean oil register. The marinade does the work a sauce would otherwise do, so the build is less about adding and more about not diluting: the heart brings tang, salt, herb, and richness all at once, and the cook's job is to keep that intact and give it a little contrast. A few leaves of something crisp, a turn of pepper, sometimes a thin slice of a firm cheese or a stripe of tapenade to deepen the savour. The risk runs the other way from a dry filling: the artichoke and its oil can leave the crumb slick, so the bread needs a genuine crust to hold its structure, and the heart should be drained just enough that it glistens rather than pools. Eaten within a few minutes of assembly the crust still resists and the oil has soaked only the cut faces, which is where you want it.
Variations stay in the same oil-and-acid world. The same loaf takes the hearts mashed lightly with a little of their marinade into a rough spread, for an even read across the bread; or paired with roasted pepper for a sweeter, softer counterpoint; or finished with a few shavings of a hard cheese when the kitchen wants a salt edge against the tang. Each holds the bread and the restraint constant and adjusts only what sits with the artichoke. The Sandwich aux Artichauts belongs with the plant-forward builds the catalog groups under Sandwich Végétarien. Its specific contribution to that shelf is a vegetable that arrives pre-seasoned in oil and acid, so the sandwich's job is to frame that brightness rather than dress it again.