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Creamed Japanese Crosnes
1 quart crosnes 1 pint milk 3 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt Cleanse the crosnes thoroughly by scrubbing with a vegetable brush, plunge them into boiling, salted water, and boil ten or fifteen minutes, or until tender. Drain, and prepare a white sauce of the milk, butter, flour and salt. Turn the sauce over the crosnes, and cook two or three minutes.
A straightforward creamed vegetable; the only real obstacles are sourcing the crosnes and cleaning them without destroying them.
- What crosnes areCrosnes are the small, pale, spiral tubers of Stachys affinis, sold today as Chinese artichoke or Japanese artichoke. They turn up at farmers' markets in late autumn and winter and rarely in supermarkets; Jerusalem artichoke cut into chunks is sometimes suggested as a substitute, though it cooks softer and tastes sweeter.
- Quart as a volume of vegetableA quart measure of crosnes is roughly a pound. The pint of milk with 3 tablespoons each butter and flour makes a generous medium sauce for that quantity, enough for four as a side dish.
- Cleaning without peelingThe tubers are ridged and hold grit in every fold, which is why a brush is specified. Do not peel them: the skin is thin and edible, and peeling a crosne wastes most of it. A quick toss in coarse salt in a cloth bag, then a rinse, loosens dirt faster than brushing each one.
- Boil brieflyTen to fifteen minutes is the outside limit. Crosnes are prized for a crisp, water-chestnut snap and small ones can be tender in five to eight minutes; test early and drain the moment a knife slides in, or they collapse into mush in the sauce.
- The white sauceCook the butter and flour together a minute or two without colouring, then add the milk gradually and simmer until it thickens and loses any raw-flour taste. The original assumes the reader knows this; the recipe's own final "two or three minutes" is only to heat the tubers through, not to cook the sauce.
- DiscolouringPeeled or bruised crosnes brown quickly and will grey a white sauce. Keep them whole, and if they must sit after scrubbing, hold them in cold water with a squeeze of lemon.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt in the sauce is right for unsalted butter and modern milk, but the dish is flat without pepper and benefits from a grating of nutmeg or a little chopped parsley at the end.
Crosnes reached Europe from northern China and Japan in the 1880s and took their French name from Crosne, the village in the Seine-et-Oise (now Essonne) where they were first grown for market; English and American seed catalogues of the period sold them as Japanese or Chinese artichokes and predicted a great future for them that never arrived, largely because the tubers are fiddly to clean and shrivel within days of lifting.