Artichoke Soup
1 1/2 pounds artichokes 1 1/2 ounces butter 1 quart water or water in which artichokes were boiled 1 pint milk 1 ounce flour Seasoning of pepper and salt Wash, and peel the artichokes, and cut them into small pieces. Saute them in butter for five minutes; add the boiling water, and cook until the artichokes are tender--about twenty minutes. Rub through a hair-sieve; return to the saucepan. Mix the flour smoothly with a little of the milk, and add it to the soup when boiling; and cook for five minutes. Add the rest of the milk. Season and serve.
A plain white vegetable soup of the sort that filled the soup chapter of every wartime and vegetarian cookbook. The main thing to settle before you start is which artichoke is meant.
- Which artichoke"Wash, and peel... cut them into small pieces" describes Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes) rather than globe artichokes, which are trimmed rather than peeled. Buy 1 1/2 lb sunchokes; scrub well and peel thinly, or leave the skins on and sieve them out later.
- They discolour fastPeeled sunchokes brown within minutes. Drop them into water with a squeeze of lemon as you work if you want the pale ivory soup the recipe intends.
- A hair-sieveA fine horsehair-mesh drum sieve, worked with a wooden mushroom. A food mill on the fine plate does the same job; a blender followed by a pass through a fine strainer is smoother still, though the original texture is slightly grainy by design.
- The flour goes in as a slurryMixing the ounce of flour with a little of the milk and stirring it into boiling soup is a whitewash thickening, not a roux. Add it in a thin stream while whisking or it will lump, and give it the full five minutes so the raw flour taste cooks out.
- Hold the milk back from the boilThe remaining milk goes in at the end and should only be brought up to steaming. A hard boil after the milk is added will make the soup catch and taste scalded.
- MeasuresAn ounce of flour is about 3 1/2 tablespoons; 1 1/2 ounces of butter is 3 tablespoons. If the pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, that is about 2 1/2 US cups of milk and about 5 US cups of cooking liquid; if it is a US pint, use 2 cups and 4 cups.
- Use the cooking waterThe instruction to use "water in which artichokes were boiled" assumes you had some left from an earlier dish. Failing that, a light vegetable stock gives far more than plain water, which this soup badly needs.
- Yield and finishingRoughly 2 quarts, enough for six to eight as a first course. Season assertively — sunchokes are sweet and the soup is bland without enough salt and white pepper; a scrape of nutmeg or a little lemon juice at the end sharpens it.
- A digestive noteSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people do not digest comfortably in quantity. A first-course portion is prudent.
Jerusalem artichokes are the tubers of a North American sunflower, Helianthus tuberosus, and the name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, with "artichoke" borrowed for the faint resemblance in flavour. They grew almost as a weed in British and American gardens, needed no imported feed or refrigeration, and cropped when little else did, which is precisely why they turn up so often in meatless and economy cookery of the early twentieth century. A soup like this one — vegetable sweated in butter, sieved, thickened with flour, let down with milk — was the standard formula of the period, applied interchangeably to celery, parsnip, turnip or artichoke; the vegetable changed and the method did not.