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Artichoke Sauce
Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan; let it melt; put into it an onion, sliced, half a head of celery, a table-spoonful of chopped ham, a pinch of powdered cinnamon, one salt-spoonful of salt, and a little cayenne. Stir the ingredients constantly over a fire gently for a quarter of an hour, adding more butter, if necessary. Then add to them a pound of Jerusalem artichokes, boiled and beaten to a pulp, and a pint of milk. Boil all together until the sauce is rather thicker than cream. Strain, boil again, and serve hot. Time to boil the ingredients together, ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. per pint. Sufficient for rather more than a pint of sauce.
A Victorian white sauce built on Jerusalem artichoke pulp rather than flour, which means the vegetable itself does all the thickening. The measurements are easy to convert; the one real trap is the name of the main ingredient.
- Jerusalem artichokes, not globesThese are sunchokes, the knobbly tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, and have nothing to do with globe artichokes. A pound yields roughly two cups of pulp once boiled and mashed; peel after boiling, when the skins slip off more easily.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. The recipe expects you to add more if the pan looks dry, so keep another ounce to hand.
- A salt-spoonfulThe small spoon of a Victorian condiment set, about a quarter teaspoon. Season again after straining, since the ham and the reduction both concentrate.
- Imperial pintA British pint is 20 imperial fl oz, about 570 ml, so the milk is a little under 2 1/2 US cups. The yield of "rather more than a pint" works out at roughly 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 US cups.
- The hinge: gentle heat, no scorchingFifteen minutes of sweating the onion, celery and ham should soften them without colour; brown flecks will show in the finished white sauce. Once the milk goes in, the starchy pulp settles and catches easily, so stir across the base of the pan and keep the boil to a lazy one.
- StrainingPush through a fine sieve with the back of a ladle rather than pouring, or you will lose most of the artichoke and be left with thin milk. A quick blitz with a stick blender before sieving makes the job much shorter.
- CinnamonA pinch is exactly right and easy to overdo; it reads as warmth rather than as spice. Ground cinnamon loses its edge fast, so use a jar you have opened recently.
- ServingAbout 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 cups, enough for six to eight servings as a sauce. The recipe does not say what it was to be served with; a sauce of this kind would suit boiled or roast poultry, veal or poached white fish, and it can be let down with stock as a soup base.
- A note on digestionSunchokes are high in inulin, which many people find gassy. Small portions are wiser than large ones the first time you serve it.
Cassell's places this among the sauces of the plain English repertoire, where the Jerusalem artichoke had a long and slightly unfashionable career. The tuber came to Europe from North America in the early seventeenth century. Its English name is often traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, rather than to any link with Jerusalem, though this derivation is traditional rather than settled; the second half of the name is usually explained by a resemblance in flavour to the globe artichoke, a comparison some early writers made. By the late Victorian period the plant was grown widely because it was cheap and grew almost anywhere, and cookery books offered it boiled, fried, in soup and, as here, pounded into a sauce. The chopped ham, the celery and the pinch of cinnamon are typical of the period's white sauces, which leaned on savoury aromatics and a whisper of sweet spice rather than on stock alone, and the printed cost of 1s. 2d. per pint is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households keeping accounts.