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Artichoke Soup
2 pints white stock or water, 1 pint milk, 2 pounds Jerusalem artichokes, 2 onions, 1 bay leaf, 1 strip celery, 2 tablespoons Crisco, pepper and salt to taste.
Wash artichokes, put 1 tablespoon vinegar into basin of water and keep artichokes in it as much as possible while paring them, to preserve their whiteness. Cut onions, bay leaf, celery, and artichokes into slices, melt Crisco in stewpan, fry vegetables 10 or 15 minutes without browning; then pour in stock and boil until tender. Rub through fine sieve, return to saucepan, add milk and seasoning, bring to boil and serve.
When a thicker soup is desired 1 dessertspoon of cornstarch, flour, or a mashed potato should be blended with little milk or stock, and added to soup a few minutes before serving.
A plain purée soup built on Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem. A few of the terms and tools have shifted since it was written.
- Know the vegetableJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the knobbly tubers of a perennial sunflower, not globe artichokes. Two pounds untrimmed will lose a fair amount to paring; buy a little over if the tubers are very gnarled.
- The acidulated water mattersCut sunchokes discolour within minutes. The vinegar bath is the hinge of the recipe if you want the pale ivory soup the author intends; work fast and return each peeled tuber to the water.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, so it appears in nearly every recipe. Butter is the obvious substitute here, two tablespoons, and it suits the soup better; any neutral oil also works.
- Sweat, do not fry"Fry without browning" means sweating over low heat with the pan partly covered. Colour on the onion or the artichoke will muddy both flavour and appearance.
- DessertspoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. For the three pints of liquid in this recipe that is a light thickening; a mashed potato gives a rounder body.
- Sieve or blenderA blender or stick blender does in thirty seconds what the fine sieve was for, though passing the purée through a sieve afterwards still catches skin fragments and gives a smoother result.
- After the milk goes inBring it just to the boil and serve. A hard or prolonged boil after the milk risks catching on the pan bottom and dulls the flavour.
- YieldThree pints of liquid before reduction, so roughly six modest first-course servings.
- A word on digestionSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which passes undigested to the gut and is notorious for causing wind. Serve small portions to anyone eating them for the first time.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook produced by manufacturers rather than publishers: Procter & Gamble issued it to persuade cooks that Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, could replace butter, lard and drippings in every part of the meal, which is why a delicate white soup opens by melting shortening in the stewpan. The vegetable itself has a longer and stranger history. Jerusalem artichokes are native to North America and were cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before European contact; the plant reached Europe in the early seventeenth century, and the "Jerusalem" is generally traced to a corruption of girasole, the Italian for sunflower, while "artichoke" was borrowed for the taste of the cooked tuber. In Britain and the United States the soup made from them was often called Palestine soup, on the same misunderstanding, and it was a standard of the winter table precisely because the tubers keep in the ground through frost and can be lifted as needed.