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Pepper and Salt (Wash peel and slice)
Wash, peel, and slice the vegetables in lemonjuice and water. Melt the butter in a stewpan, put in the vegetables, and cook carefully for about five minutes, being careful the vegetables do not brown. Add the stock and boil until the T artichokes are tender, then rub them through a hair-sieve. Return the soup to the saucepan, warm it up, add the cream, and it is ready to serve.
This is the method half of a Jerusalem artichoke soup — the printed ingredient list has not survived with the text, so quantities have to be reconstructed. The technique itself is complete and still sound.
- What the "T artichokes" areJerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), not globe artichokes. The knobbly tubers discolour within a minute of peeling, which is the whole reason for the acidulated water.
- Missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list is absent from this page, so no amounts can be given honestly. A workable ratio for this style of soup is about 2 lb peeled tubers, 1 to 2 oz butter, 2 pints white stock and a gill (a quarter pint) of cream, but that is a reconstruction rather than the book's own figures.
- The acidulated water mattersSlice straight into the lemon juice and water and leave the pieces submerged until they go into the pan. Air exposure turns the cut surfaces grey-brown and the finished soup dingy rather than ivory.
- "Do not brown"This is the hinge. The five minutes in butter is a sweating step over low heat; any colour on the tubers gives the soup a nutty, roasted character rather than the delicate one the method aims at.
- Hair sieveA fine horsehair sieve, pushed through with a wooden mushroom. A blender followed by a fine mesh strainer gives the same smooth result faster — sunchokes purée very readily.
- Adding the creamWarm the soup through after the cream goes in but do not let it boil; a rolling boil can split the emulsion and coarsens the texture.
- SeasoningThe title suggests pepper and salt appeared in the ingredient list. Season at the end, after the cream, since reduction during boiling concentrates the stock's own salt.
- YieldOn the quantities above, roughly six small soup-plate servings as a first course.
Jerusalem artichoke soup was a fixture of British and Anglo-French kitchens through the nineteenth century, usually appearing on menus as Palestine soup — a pun built on the vegetable's misleading name, which is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, the plant being a North American sunflower relative rather than any kind of artichoke. The tubers were cheap, grew almost anywhere, and stored through winter, which made them a staple of the kitchen garden long before they became a restaurant novelty again. The treatment here is textbook high-class cookery of the period: sweat in butter without colour, moisten with white stock, sieve, finish with cream. The sieving was done by hand through a hair sieve, before mechanical purée equipment reached domestic kitchens.