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Lyonnaise Artichokes
Boil, drain and slice one pint of artichokes. Put two ounces of butter in a frying pan, slice into it one small onion, then add the artichokes and fry until a golden brown, stirring carefully. When done skim them carefully from the butter, place in a hot dish, sprinkle with salt, pepper and chopped parsley. Serve immediately.
A Lyonnaise treatment — butter and onion — applied to artichokes rather than the usual potatoes. The method is straightforward; the main question is which artichoke is meant.
- Which artichokeMeasuring by the pint and slicing after boiling both suggest Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), which many nineteenth-century American books call simply "artichokes". Globe artichoke bottoms would also work and would be treated the same way, but a pint of them is a great many chokes to trim.
- A pint by measureThis is a volume of prepared pieces, not a weight of whole vegetables. Reckon on about a pound of sunchokes, scrubbed and peeled or left in their skins, to fill a pint once cooked and sliced.
- Boil brieflySunchokes go from firm to collapsed quickly and they are being fried afterward. Ten to fifteen minutes in salted water, until a knife just enters, is enough; anything softer will break apart in the pan.
- Dry them before fryingThe recipe says drain, but boiled slices hold surface water and will steam rather than brown. Spread them on a towel and let them dry off while the butter heats.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, which is generous for a pint of slices and deliberately so — the artichokes are lifted out of the butter at the end rather than served in it.
- Slice the onion thinIt goes in raw and must cook through in the same time the artichokes take to colour. Thin half-moons, started a minute before the artichokes, will be sweet and soft by the time the slices are golden.
- Skim from the butterThe instruction matters: lifting the pieces out with a slotted spoon leaves the browned milk solids and excess fat behind, so the dish tastes of butter without being greasy. The seasoning goes on afterward, off the heat.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish.
- A note on sunchokesThey store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people digest poorly. Small portions are advisable.
Anything called lyonnaise in a nineteenth-century kitchen means onions and butter, after the cooking of Lyon; the term attached itself in English chiefly to fried potatoes and then spread to whatever else could be sliced and browned the same way. Jerusalem artichokes were a familiar and cheap garden crop in America long before they became a specialty item, grown for their tubers and often treated exactly like potatoes — boiled, mashed, scalloped, or fried in butter as here. Their name has nothing to do with Jerusalem: it is generally traced to a corruption of girasole, Italian for sunflower, the plant being a North American sunflower relative.