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PALESTINE SOUP (another way)
Peel two dozen freshly-dug Jerusalem artichokes, and slice them into a stewpan containing three pints of stock, or of the liquid in which a leg of mutton has been boiled. Add four onions, four potatoes, a few sticks of celery, two ounces of lean ham, and simmer all gently together until the vegetables are soft enough, then press them through a fine sieve, rubbing them well with the back of a wooden spoon. Return the pulp and the liquid to the saucepan, season it well with salt, and add a little sugar if the artichokes were old. Stir the soup over the fire until it boils; put in half a pint of boiling milk or cream, and serve immediately. The soup should not boil after the cream is added. Time, an hour and a half. Probable cost, 10d. per pint. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A straightforward Victorian purée soup whose only real trick is restraint at the end. Two things need attention: the artichokes discolour fast, and the soup must not boil once the cream goes in.
- The hinge: no boiling after the creamMilk or cream stirred into a hot, well-salted purée can curdle if it is brought back to the boil. Bring the soup to boiling point first, then take it off the heat and stir in the hot dairy.
- How many artichokesTwo dozen tubers is a loose measure, since size varies widely; reckon on roughly 2 to 2½ lb (about 1 kg) peeled weight for three pints of stock. Drop the peeled slices straight into water with a squeeze of lemon, as the cut flesh browns within minutes.
- Mutton liquorThe water a leg of mutton had boiled in was an obvious thing to keep in a kitchen of this period, and gives the soup its backbone. Lamb or chicken stock does the same job; skim the fat, and taste before salting, since the ham is already salty.
- Three pintsAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so three pints is about 1.7 litres and the half pint of cream about 285 ml. Half a pint of cream to six servings is rich by current taste — half milk, half cream is closer to modern balance.
- SievingA blender or stick blender is much quicker than the wooden spoon, but Jerusalem artichokes have stringy knuckles even when peeled. Pass the blended soup through a sieve anyway if you want the velvety texture the recipe is after.
- TimeAn hour and a half covers the whole operation including sieving. The vegetables themselves need only 25 to 35 minutes of gentle simmering — sliced artichokes and potatoes collapse well before that if cut small.
- The sugarThe recipe adds sugar only if the artichokes were old; a teaspoon is enough. Freshly lifted tubers need none, so taste before adding.
- A note on inulinJerusalem artichokes store carbohydrate as inulin, which passes largely undigested to the gut and is famously windy. Ordinary cooking does little to change this; small servings are wiser than large ones for anyone unaccustomed to them.
- YieldSix to seven as written, as a first course of a full dinner — roughly a generous cup each. As a main-course soup it will serve four.
The name is a pun rather than a geography lesson. Jerusalem artichoke is a North American sunflower tuber, Helianthus tuberosus, and the "Jerusalem" is often said to come from an English mangling of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though that derivation is contested; in any case Victorian cooks, following the name, called the pur erf9e of them Palestine soup. It appears in English cookery books of the later nineteenth century, Cassell's included, because the tubers were cheap, grew almost anywhere in a kitchen garden, and were lifted through the winter when little else was in the ground. The instruction to build the soup on the water a leg of mutton had boiled in is a good marker of the period: nothing left the kitchen unused, and a joint's cooking liquor was expected to reappear the next day as the base of something else.