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Jerusalem Artichokes, A La Sauce
Wash well in plenty of water, peel or turn them in the form of large olives or small pears; boil them in water, with a piece of butter and a little salt, for fifteen minutes; when done drain them upon a cloth, dish them up carefully, pour some butter sauce over them, and serve.
A plain boiled vegetable dish that depends almost entirely on not overcooking the tubers. Jerusalem artichokes go from firm to collapsed in a very short window.
- "Turn them in the form of large olives"Turning means paring a vegetable into a smooth, even barrel or olive shape with a small knife, so all pieces cook at the same rate. On knobbly sunchokes this wastes a great deal; trimming to roughly even 1½-inch chunks achieves the same cooking result.
- Peeling is optionalThe skin is thin and edible, and scrubbing rather than peeling saves both time and flesh. If you do peel, drop the pieces into acidulated water at once — cut surfaces brown quickly.
- Fifteen minutes is an upper limitSunchokes cut to size are usually tender at 8 to 12 minutes. Past the point of tenderness they turn to mush very abruptly, so start testing early with a knife tip.
- Butter in the cooking waterThe recipe gives no quantities; about 1 tablespoon per pound with a teaspoon of salt is a reasonable reading of "a piece of butter and a little salt." It enriches the vegetable lightly.
- "Butter sauce"In English cookery books of this period the term usually means a flour-thickened sauce enriched with butter (the same thing often called melted butter) rather than plain melted butter alone -- roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk or the cooking liquid, seasoned with salt and a little lemon.
- Draining on a clothSunchokes hold surface water and will thin the sauce. A clean towel or several layers of paper, and a minute of standing, is worth the trouble.
- YieldAllow about 8 oz of untrimmed tubers per person; 2 lb serves four as a side dish.
- A digestive noteJerusalem artichokes store carbohydrate as inulin, which many people do not digest easily. Modest portions are advisable at a first encounter.
The Jerusalem artichoke is neither from Jerusalem nor an artichoke: it is the tuber of Helianthus tuberosus, a North American sunflower taken to Europe in the early seventeenth century. The name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, with "artichoke" attached for the flavour of the cooked flesh, though this account is traditional rather than documented. The tubers were long grown in Britain as a cheap winter vegetable, though much of that use had been displaced by the potato; they were commonly boiled and sauced, or made into the pale soup called Palestine soup -- another pun on the mistaken name. The instruction to turn the tubers into olives or small pears belongs to the French service tradition that shaped much English cookery writing of the period: a homely root was made presentable by being cut to a uniform shape and masked with a white sauce.