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Jerusalem Artichokes
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 lb. artichokes 2 tablespoonfuls flour 1 yolk of egg 2 teaspoonfuls lemon juice 1 1/2 cupfuls milk 2 tablespoonfuls cream Salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 1/4 cupful vinegar 1 pint boiling milk Wash and scrape artichokes, and throw each one in cold water containing vinegar; when all are done, rinse in water and put into boiling milk, add cupful of boiling water and teaspoonful of salt. Boil quickly with lid off, pierce with fork to know if done. Lift into hot dish and cover with sauce. Blend Crisco and flour in saucepan, over fire, add milk, salt and pepper, and cook five minutes. Remove from fire, add egg beaten with cream and lemon juice, pour over artichokes and sprinkle parsley over top.
A plain boiled vegetable under a lemony egg-thickened white sauce, from one of the Crisco promotional books. The ingredient list runs the cooking liquid and the sauce together, so read it twice before you start.
- Two separate milk quantitiesThe pint of boiling milk is the cooking liquid for the tubers; the 1 1/2 cupfuls is for the sauce. They are not interchangeable, and the pint of cooking milk is discarded (or saved for soup) rather than poured over the dish.
- What a Jerusalem artichoke isNot an artichoke at all but the knobbly tuber of a sunflower, sold now as sunchoke. A pound is roughly three cups once scraped. Scraping the knobs is fiddly; a thin peeler and a firm hand get most of the skin, and unpeeled scrubbed tubers cook perfectly well.
- The vinegar bathThe quarter cup of vinegar in cold water is there to stop the cut surfaces browning while you work through the pound. Rinse well before cooking or the sauce will taste sharp on top of the lemon juice.
- CriscoNewly on the market when this book was published and the reason the book exists. Butter is the obvious swap, two tablespoons, and it improves the sauce.
- Boiling in milkMilk scorches. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat brisk but not fierce, and stir once or twice. "Boil quickly with lid off" means about 15 to 20 minutes for medium tubers; test with a fork from about 12 minutes, since sunchokes go from firm to collapsing quickly.
- The egg yolk is the hingeOnce the yolk, cream and lemon juice go in, the sauce must not return to the boil or it will curdle and thin. Take the pan off the heat, temper a little hot sauce into the yolk mixture first, then combine and serve at once.
- Oven and timing termsThere are none here, but note the sauce's "cook five minutes" is for the flour-and-fat base with the milk; five minutes of gentle simmering is the minimum to cook out the raw flour taste.
- YieldA pound of tubers with this much sauce serves four as a side dish.
- A digestive noteSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people do not digest. A generous first helping can cause considerable wind; serve modest portions to anyone new to them.
A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, and the recipes are built so that the new fat appears wherever butter or lard once would have. That accounts for the two tablespoonfuls of Crisco standing at the head of an otherwise conventional French-style vegetable dish: tubers boiled in milk, napped with a milk-based white sauce finished with egg yolk and lemon, a treatment nineteenth-century cookbooks give to salsify, cardoons and celery root as well. The Jerusalem artichoke itself is a North American plant, Helianthus tuberosus, cultivated by Indigenous peoples before European contact and carried to Europe in the early seventeenth century, where it was popular long enough to fall out of fashion. The name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though the etymology is traditional rather than firmly documented; the "artichoke" half comes from a supposed resemblance in flavour to the globe artichoke's heart.