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Artichokes, Jerusalem, Soup, or Puree Of
Put a piece of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan; let it melt; then throw into it two bay-leaves, one sliced onion, three pounds of Jerusalem artichokes washed, pared, and sliced, and half a pound of bacon in rashers. Keep these well stirred in the boiling butter for about ten minutes; then add to them, gradually, one pint of stock. Let all boil up together until the vegetables are thoroughly cooked; then add three pints more stock, stir it well, add pepper and salt to taste, press it through a sieve, and add one pint of boiling milk. Boil five minutes more, and serve with toasted bread cut in dice. Time to boil, about one hour and a half. Probable cost, 10d. per pint. Sufficient for six persons.
A straightforward butter-and-stock vegetable pur",The book gives quantities and a yield, so little needs translating beyond the vessels and a few habits of Victorian soup-making.
- Butter the size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian recipes often measured fat by eye against familiar objects; an egg-sized lump is usually taken as about 2 oz.
- Do not brown the artichokesThe hinge of the dish is the ten minutes of stirring in butter. Jerusalem artichokes should sweat and soften without colouring, because any scorching turns the finished pur",e muddy grey-brown and gives it a burnt-caramel edge that milk will not cover.
- Peeling and discolourationPared artichokes oxidise within minutes. Drop the slices into acidulated water as you work and drain them before they go into the butter.
- The baconThe recipe does not specify cut or cure; streaky suits it, and since the soup is pressed through a sieve the bacon is there for fat and savour rather than to be eaten. Modern bacon is wetter and saltier, so hold back on the salt until after the milk goes in. Heavily smoked bacon will dominate the whole pot.
- Stock quantitiesOne pint first, then three more, in imperial measure — the recipe as written uses 4 imperial pints, about 2.3 litres, or roughly 10 US cups. Light chicken or veal stock suits it; a dark beef stock overwhelms the vegetable.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a sieve or tammy was the usual route to a puree when this was written. A blender does it faster, but pass the soup through a fine sieve afterwards anyway: stray fibre from the artichokes and the bacon stays stringy however long you blend.
- The stated timeAn hour and a half is far longer than sliced artichokes need. They are tender in 20 to 25 minutes of simmering, and the flavour is fresher and sweeter if you sieve them then rather than letting them stew.
- The final milkAdd the boiling milk off the heat or at a bare simmer and give it the five minutes stated, no more. A hard boil after the milk goes in risks catching on the base of the pan and will dull the colour.
- YieldFour pints of stock and a pint of milk, so appreciably over two litres once sieved; six servings as a first course. The croutons are not optional decoration -- the soup is soft-textured throughout and wants the contrast.
The Jerusalem artichoke is neither an artichoke nor from Jerusalem: it is the tuber of Helianthus tuberosus, a North American sunflower relative brought to Europe in the early seventeenth century. The name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though the story is traditional rather than proven; the "artichoke" half came from a perceived likeness in flavour to the globe artichoke's heart. By the late Victorian period the tuber was cheap, grew almost anywhere, and had a settled reputation as a soup vegetable — Palestine soup, as the cream version was often called on English menus, a pun that leaned further into the mistaken geography. The recipe's structure — sweat in butter, build with stock, sieve, finish with milk — is the standard nineteenth-century template for a vegetable pur",e, applied here to one of the plainest roots in the kitchen garden.