Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. death by judicial hanging; thus have a hearty choke (and caper sauce) for breakfast v.

[1630		J. Taylor ‘Description of Tyburne’ in Works (1869) II 134: Some say they are Choak’d peares, and some againe / Doe call them Hartie Choakes].
1785, 1788, 1796		Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue n.p.: Hearty choak, he will have a hearty choak and caper sauce for breakfast; i.e. he will be hanged.
1811		Lex. Balatronicum [as cit. 1785].
1818		T. Brown Brighton I 52: We wonder not at the noble peer’s having checked an honest tear when his friend [...] got a sheriff’s breakfast* [note] * A sheriff's breakfast is a hearty choak and a caper.
1823		Egan Grose’s Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue [as cit. 1785].
1831		Satirist (London) 5 June 71/1: ‘No hearty chokes for them, as my pal Charley Molloy, that gallows chap, would say in his noose-paper.
1831		Satirist (London) 14 Aug. 151/3: The following are the names of a few of the company [...] Artichokes...Mr John Ketch.
1834		(con. 1737–9) W.H. Ainsworth Rookwood (1857) 177: To the tune of a ‘hearty choke with caper sauce.’.
c.1838		G.W.M. Reynolds ‘The House Breaker’s Song’ in Farmer Musa Pedestris (1896) 123: For I’m snigger’d if we will be trepanned / [...] / And thus be lagged to a foreign land, / Or die by an artichoke.
1840		Flash Mirror 9: May you have an artichoke some morning about hot-roll time.
1845		C. Rowcroft Tales of the Colonies 268: To-morrow he will have a sheriff’s breakfast, eh ! old boy, a hearty choke and a caper !
1855		H.A. Wise Tales for the Marines 318: Dearful lest they would treat him to a ‘vegetable breakfast on a hearty-choke and caper sauce,’ he very prudently kept snug, out of their reach.
1861		R.F. Burton City of the Saints 111: The driver [...] grumbled certain western facetiæ concerning ‘hearty-chokes and caper sauce.’.
[1882		Bristol Magpie 3 Aug. 3/1: It cut me to the marrow, quite; / I felt my heart, it broke, / When he, my windpipe holding tight, / Gave me a arti-choke].
1883		L.S. Wingfield Abigel Rowe 122: He got off with a month’s imprisonment, and for that time, at least, escaped the proverbial sheriff's breakfast — a hearty choke and a caper.
1892		Oakleigh Leader (Nth Brighton, Vic.) 3 Sept. 45/5: Thieves [...] don’t like to hear of a man being hanged. He goes for a ‘hearty choke with caper sauce’ or he ‘goes up the laddder to bed’ or he ‘dies in a horse’s nightcap, i.e. a halter.

2. a non-judicial strangulation, a choking.

1833

Satirist (London) 3 Feb. 461/2: Baron Rotchy [i.e. Rothschild] nearly strangled himself with laughing [...] last Sunday morning. [...] it was merely a sort of a Jerusalem hearty choke, an esculent of which the Baron is particularly fond.

3. a garotting.

1862

Morn. Post 18 Dec. 3/3: This here ticker was a bloke’s that I served with hearty-chokes.