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Palestine Soup
Take three dozen Jerusalem artichokes, peel them, and throw them into cold water as they are done, or they will become discoloured. Put them into a saucepan with four onions, the outer sticks of a head of celery, and three pints of white stock, and let them simmer gently for an hour. Take out the onions and the celery, and press the artichokes through a fine sieve; put the puree back into the saucepan, and when it is quite hot stir into it a pint of boiling cream, or if preferred, a mixture of cream and milk, season with salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg, simmer a minute or two, and serve immediately. Send fried bread, cut into small dice, to table on a separate dish. If liked, two bay-leaves can be used instead of onions and celery.
A Victorian purée soup that depends on two things: keeping the tubers pale, and not letting the cream boil the soup into graininess.
- Three dozen artichokesJerusalem artichokes of the knobbly old sort ran small, so three dozen is roughly 3 to 3½ lb after peeling. Weigh rather than count; modern cultivars are often much larger.
- Keep them whiteThe cut flesh browns within minutes. Cold water alone slows it; water with a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of vinegar holds the colour properly, and a scrap of the acid carrying into the pot does no harm.
- PeelingOn very knobbly tubers, scrubbing well and simmering with the skin on is quicker, since the purée goes through a sieve anyway. Peeled gives a whiter soup.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Three imperial pints is 60 fl oz, about 7½ US cups. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything brown or heavily reduced, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- Sieve or blenderA blender or stick blender does in a minute what the fine sieve did in ten, but pass the result through a sieve afterwards if you want the smooth, almost silky texture the original is aiming at.
- The cream is the hingeAdd it boiling, as directed, and give the soup no more than a minute or two of the barest simmer. Held at a rolling boil after the cream goes in, the soup thins, separates and loses its gloss. A pint of cream to three of stock is rich; half cream and half milk, as offered, suits most tastes.
- SeasoningNutmeg grated fresh, and not much of it. Salt late, after the stock has reduced by an hour of simmering.
- CroutonsSmall dice of bread fried in butter or a mix of butter and oil, sent separately so they stay crisp. Add them at the table.
- YieldAbout 3½ pints of finished soup, enough for six to eight as a first course.
- A word on digestionJerusalem artichokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people do not digest comfortably in quantity. This is a rich soup; serve it in small bowls.
The name is a joke that outlived its own explanation. The tuber is Helianthus tuberosus, a North American sunflower relative with no connection to Jerusalem or to globe artichokes; the usual account traces "Jerusalem" to a mangling of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though this is a traditional etymology rather than a documented one. Having acquired that name, the vegetable acquired a soup called Palestine, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Palestine Soup was fixed in English kitchen vocabulary as the standard cream of Jerusalem artichoke. It is a plain white purée soup of the familiar kind: cheap root vegetable, good stock, a great deal of cream, and fried bread to give it texture. The alternative finish offered at the end, two bay leaves in place of the onion and celery, points to the more delicate version, where nothing is allowed to compete with the artichoke's slightly sweet, smoky flavour.