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Jerusalem Artichokes
Wash and scrub. Cook in boiling salted water. Serve with melted butter or white sauce. They may be marinated with French dressing and served cold.
A four-line instruction that assumes you know the vegetable. Jerusalem artichokes are sold today as sunchokes, and the two things that matter are keeping them from browning and not cooking them past the point where they collapse.
- What to buyLook for sunchokes or sunroot — knobby, pale tan tubers about the size of a small ginger hand. One and a half to two pounds serves four as a side dish.
- Scrub, don't peelThe skin is thin and edible, and the knobs make peeling wasteful. A stiff brush under running water is all the "wash and scrub" the original intends; trim any soft or greenish spots.
- Acidulate the waterCut surfaces discolour quickly. Drop trimmed or halved tubers into water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar as you work, and add a little acid to the cooking water to keep them ivory rather than grey.
- TimingBoil in well-salted water 15 to 20 minutes for whole medium tubers, 10 to 12 for halves — a knife should meet slight resistance. Past that they go from firm-crisp to watery mush very suddenly, which is the main way this dish fails.
- White sauceA period white sauce is butter and flour cooked together and thinned with milk; a medium version runs about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk, cooked out for a couple of minutes and seasoned with salt and pepper. Thinner proportions (1 tablespoon each) were equally common, and nutmeg is optional rather than assumed.
- French dressingPeriod usage for a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper — no mustard or emulsifier assumed. Dress the tubers while still warm so they absorb it, then chill.
- A note on digestionSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which passes undigested and is notoriously gassy for some people. Modest portions are the reliable remedy; long cooking is sometimes said to help by breaking down some of the inulin, but the effect is limited.
Jerusalem artichokes are neither artichokes nor from Jerusalem: the plant is Helianthus tuberosus, a North American sunflower whose tubers were eaten by Indigenous peoples long before European contact and which reached European gardens in the early seventeenth century. The name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, for the sunflower that turns toward the sun, while "artichoke" is often said to have attached itself because early tasters thought the cooked tuber resembled an artichoke bottom. By the time Maria Willett Howard compiled Lowney's Cook Book for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in 1907, the vegetable was a familiar if unfashionable American garden crop — easy to grow, hard to eradicate — and the book gives it a brisk treatment: boil, butter, or dress cold. The terse style is typical of the period's vegetable chapters, where a competent cook was expected to supply the judgement the text left out.