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Artichokes, Jerusalem, Boiled
Peel the artichokes, and throw each root into cold water and vinegar immediately, to preserve the colour. Put them into boiling water, with a little salt, until sufficiently tender for a fork to pass through them easily, then pile them on a dish, and serve as hot as possible with melted butter or white sauce poured over. Time to boil, about twenty minutes. They should be tried with a fork frequently after a quarter of an hour, as they will become black and tasteless if allowed to remain on the fire longer than necessary. Allow two pounds for a tureen. Probable cost, 2d. or 3d. per pound.
A straightforward boiling method that hinges on two things: keeping the peeled tubers out of the air, and pulling them the moment a fork slides through.
- What the vegetable isJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the tubers of a North American sunflower, not globe artichokes and not related to them. Look for firm, unwrinkled knobs; shrivelled ones cook to mush.
- Acidulated waterThe cut surfaces brown within a minute or two. A bowl of cold water with a splash of vinegar or lemon juice, ready before you start peeling, is not optional if you want them pale.
- The timing is the pointTwenty minutes is an outside figure. Start testing at twelve to fifteen minutes; sunchokes go from firm to collapsed quickly, and overcooked ones darken and turn flat-tasting, exactly as the original warns.
- PeelingThe knobbly shape makes peeling wasteful. Scrubbing well and boiling in the skin is common now, and the skins slip off easily afterwards if you want them off.
- "Melted butter"In a Victorian English kitchen this meant a thin white sauce of butter, flour and water or milk, not simply butter melted in a pan. The alternative given, white sauce, is essentially the same thing enriched.
- "Two pounds for a tureen"An ambiguous instruction: it appears to mean two pounds of tubers as a serving dish for the table rather than a quantity per person. Two pounds peeled will serve four to six as a side.
- InulinSunchokes store carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which is why they taste sweet and why they are notorious for causing wind. Small portions are prudent the first time you serve them.
- CostTwopence or threepence a pound was a modest price for a winter root vegetable.
Jerusalem artichokes came to Europe from eastern North America in the early seventeenth century and were widely grown before the potato displaced them. The name is a double misnomer: the plant has no connection to Jerusalem, and the word is generally traced to a garbling of girasole, Italian for sunflower, while "artichoke" refers only to a supposed resemblance in flavour to the globe artichoke's heart. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the late nineteenth century the tuber had settled into the role it holds here, a cheap winter root treated much like a potato, boiled and sauced, and priced accordingly. Its habit of growing vigorously from any scrap of tuber left in the ground kept it common in cottage gardens long after fashionable tables had lost interest.