German Sauce
See Allemande.
GIRASOL (commonly called Jerusalem) ARTICHOKES. - Put them for a quarter of an hour in water, with a pat of butter and a little salt. Drain them, dish them, and pour over them some English sauce.
Girasol Soup-commonly called Palestine.-Peel and slice about a peck of them. Slice also four onions and a head of celery. Simmer them in a stewpan for an hour, with two ounces of butter, three pints of veal stock, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and an ounce of sugar. Pass it through a sieve, heat it over the fire, add a pint of hot cream, and serve it with fried crusts.
GLAZE has three distinct meanings. 1. To glaze a sauce, or boil it down to a glaze, is really to roast it. The sauce is reduced by boiling till it catches the pan and browns. Further explanation of the identity of glazing and roasting will be found in the article on Sauces. The process of reducing to glaze is the chief distinction in all the brown preparations of food as distinct from the white; and it is not only every day performed in soups, sauces, and gravies, but the cook gets ready and keeps by him a quantity of glaze, which he uses for finishing his sauces and anointing his meats. To make this glaze, it is found that the best substance is veal-the juices of which, being very gelatinous, take a fine colour and yield a rich odour. Take knuckle of veal and gravy beef together, but twice Goose as much of the one as of the other; and make a good broth of this in the ordinary way, by adding vegetables and using half a gallon of water for every three pounds of meat. The broth is then to be strained through a napkin, freed from fat, and put on the fire again for reduction to a cullis. When the cullis roasts, it forms glaze, and care must be taken that it does not burn. The glaze, if well made, is the concentrated extract of meat, and better than Liebig. 2. To glaze meat is to paint it before sending it to table with a brush which has been dipped in glaze. 3. To glaze cakes or other sweets is to coat them in like manner with sugar.
Three separate entries have been run together here: boiled Jerusalem artichokes, Palestine soup, and the making of meat glaze. All are workable, though the soup is written for a household cooking on a very different scale.
- A peck is far too muchA peck is a dry measure of two gallons — perhaps 12 to 14 lb of Jerusalem artichokes, far more soup than a modern household wants. Note that the original allows only 3 pints of stock and a pint of cream for that whole mass of tubers, so a smaller version has to be re-balanced rather than simply scaled down: for six, about 2 lb of tubers, one onion, half a head of celery, 1 oz butter, 1½ pints veal stock and a scant ½ pint cream.
- Girasol means sunflowerGirasol (Italian girasole) is the sunflower family plant sold today as Jerusalem artichoke or sunchoke. It is a knobbly tuber, not a globe artichoke, and needs no trimming beyond scrubbing and peeling.
- They discolour fastPeeled and sliced tubers brown within minutes. Drop them into water with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar as you work, or the finished soup turns grey rather than ivory.
- The quarter of an hourFifteen minutes in buttered salted water suits small whole tubers; larger ones want 20 to 25 minutes, and they go to mush quickly once tender. Test with a knife tip rather than trusting the clock.
- English sauceProbably the plain English melted-butter sauce: butter thickened with a little flour and water or stock, seasoned, sometimes with lemon. Not the custard that "sauce anglaise" means in French pastry.
- Sieving, not blendingPassing the soup through a sieve, often after pounding, was the usual smoothing method. A blender gives a finer result, but a pass through a sieve afterwards still helps, as the tubers can leave fibrous bits behind.
- Reducing to glazeThe glaze is simply strained, degreased stock boiled down until it coats the pan and thickens to a syrup — hours of work for a few spoonfuls. Move to a smaller pan as the volume drops and stop while it is still glossy; past that point it scorches and turns bitter in seconds. Chilled, it sets to a rubbery block and keeps for weeks.
- Better than LiebigThe comparison is to Liebig's Extract of Meat, the commercial bouillon paste of the period. The modern equivalent is a stock cube or concentrated bouillon, and the point stands: reduced veal stock has a body those cannot imitate.
- InulinJerusalem artichokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which ferments in the gut rather than digesting. Their nineteenth-century reputation for causing wind is deserved; serve modest portions.
The double naming in this entry is a small history lesson in itself. Girasole, Italian for sunflower, is generally traced as the source of the English "Jerusalem" artichoke, a mishearing that stuck to a North American tuber with no connection to Jerusalem and only a passing flavour resemblance to the artichoke. Palestine soup takes the joke a step further, its name evidently following from the Jerusalem in the vegetable's; it was a fixture of English dinner menus from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Kettner's insistence on calling the vegetable girasol is characteristic of the book, which takes its name from the Soho restaurant of Auguste Kettner and takes visible pleasure in correcting kitchen French and kitchen English alike. The long note on glaze belongs to the same world: a professional kitchen that kept a pot of reduced veal stock permanently at hand, and could afford to boil a gallon of broth down to a cupful.