Home › Vegetables › Fricasseed Jerusalem Artichokes
Fricasseed Jerusalem Artichokes
Boil some artichokes according to the preceding recipe. Take them out of the water and drain them. Put a breakfast-cupful of milk into a saucepan, flavor it with salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon, and thicken it with a small piece of butter rolled in flour. Turn the artichokes into this, and let all stew together gently for a few minutes. Time to stew, five or six minutes.
A simple creamed side dish that depends entirely on not overcooking the tubers. The recipe assumes you have already boiled them by the entry printed above it, which is not reproduced here.
- The vegetableJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the knobbly tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, unrelated to globe artichokes. Scrub well and either peel thinly or leave the skin on; peeled ones brown quickly, so hold them in water with a squeeze of lemon.
- The missing boilCook them in salted water until a knife slips in easily, roughly 15 to 20 minutes for whole medium tubers, less if cut. They go from firm to collapsing quickly, so test early and drain the moment they yield.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup; period usage varied, but reckoning it at roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, about one cup of milk, is close enough. That will sauce something in the region of a pound of tubers.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié — equal parts soft butter and flour worked to a paste, about a tablespoon of each. Whisk it into the simmering milk in small pieces so it disperses rather than lumping.
- The cinnamonA pinch is the intention, not a spoonful. Cinnamon with a creamed root vegetable reads as an older English seasoning habit; a scant 1/8 teaspoon gives the warmth without turning the dish into a dessert.
- The five or six minutesThat is time for the sauce to thicken and the flour to lose its rawness, not further cooking of the vegetable. Keep the heat low and turn the pieces gently, or they break into a puree.
- YieldAbout four side-dish servings from a pound of tubers. Serve at once; the sauce tightens as it stands and the tubers weep liquid into it.
- A note on digestionSunchokes store carbohydrate as inulin, which many people find gassy in quantity. A modest portion is the sensible approach the first time you serve them.
The name is a long-standing corruption rather than a geography lesson: the plant is a North American sunflower relative, brought to Europe in the early seventeenth century. "Jerusalem" is usually explained as a mangling of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though that derivation is traditional and often repeated rather than documented. In Victorian and Edwardian English kitchens the tubers were a cheap winter root, often boiled and then sauced — fricasseed, in a white sauce, or pureed into the soup known as Palestine soup, named from the same association with the Holy Land. The warm spice here reflects an older habit in which cinnamon and mace were used more freely with milk-based vegetable dishes than they later were.