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Soup of Palestine
6 Jerusalem artichokes, I large tablespoonful of butter, 2 even tablespoonfuls of flour, 1 quart of milk, Salt and pepper to taste.
Scrape and slice six good-sized Jerusalem artichokes, throw them into cold water as soon as sliced. Put them in a saucepan of boiling water and cook one hour. Press through a purée sieve. Put the milk on to heat in a double boiler, add the artichokes. Rub the butter and flour together. Stir it into the hot mixture and stir continually until it thickens. Add the salt and pepper and serve with squares of toasted bread.
A plain white soup that depends entirely on the sweetness of the tubers. Two things in the original need adjusting: the cooking time and the way the thickening is handled.
- Jerusalem artichokesSold today as sunchokes; they are the tubers of a North American sunflower and have nothing to do with artichokes or Jerusalem. Six good-sized ones is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. Look for firm, unshrivelled tubers with as few knobs as possible, since scraping the knobbly ones wastes half the vegetable.
- An hour is far too longSliced sunchokes are tender in 20 to 25 minutes of simmering, and a full hour will leave you with a grey, flat-tasting puree. Cook until a knife slides through with no resistance, then sieve.
- The cold water is not optionalCut surfaces brown within a minute or two. Slice straight into cold water, and a squeeze of lemon in it helps; the acid also keeps the finished soup pale.
- Purée sievePuree sieve -- A food mill with the medium plate does the same job faster. A blender or stick blender works but leaves fibrous flecks behind, so pass the puree through a fine sieve afterwards if you want the smooth white soup intended here.
- Butter and flourThis is a beurre manié, not a cooked roux. Work the softened butter and flour to a smooth paste and whisk it into the hot soup in small pieces, stirring until it thickens and the raw flour taste cooks out, about five minutes. Added in one lump it will simply form a dumpling.
- QuantitiesA quart of milk is 4 cups. Whole milk gives the right body; skimmed milk makes the soup thin and slightly chalky.
- SeasoningThe soup is bland by design and needs more salt than you expect, plus white pepper so as not to speckle it. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream at the end suits it.
- YieldAbout 5 cups, serving four as a first course. The toasted bread squares are croutons; cut them small and dry them in a 350F oven rather than frying, which would overwhelm a soup this delicate.
- A digestive noteSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which passes undigested and is notoriously windy for some people. A modest serving is wise the first time.
The name is the joke and the recipe title preserves it: the tuber has been called girasole in Italian, for the sunflower that turns to the sun, and English speakers are generally said to have heard that as "Jerusalem" — hence a soup of the artichoke of Jerusalem became Palestine soup, a familiar item on nineteenth-century English and American menus. The plant is in fact a North American perennial sunflower, cultivated by Indigenous peoples long before European contact and carried back to Europe in the early 1600s, where it grew so easily that it became a common kitchen-garden crop. Its appearance in a vegetable cookery book of this period is unremarkable: mild roots were often made into white soups thickened with milk and a flour-and-butter paste, and toast squares were a common garnish.