Home › Meat Substitutes › Scalloped Jerusalem Artichokes
Scalloped Jerusalem Artichokes
1 pound of artichokes 1/4 pound grated Parmesan cheese 4 tablespoons bread crumbs 2 ounces butter Pepper, salt Wash, and pare the artichokes; boil them until quite tender, which should be in twenty minutes. Press all the water from them, and rub them through a sieve. Now beat in one ounce of butter, and season them with pepper. Butter either a French baking dish or sufficient china scallop shells to hold the mixture, room being left in each shell for the Parmesan and bread crumbs. If a dish has been used, spread the Parmesan evenly over the artichoke puree, and then the bread crumbs in the same way. Break up the remaining ounce of butter, and scatter over the dish. If the scallop shells are used, the Parmesan, bread crumbs and butter must be divided according to the number of scallops. They should be browned nicely in a quick oven.
A simple gratin of sunchoke puree under cheese and crumbs. The only real work is getting the puree dry enough that it browns rather than steams.
- The hinge: press out the waterBoiled sunchokes hold a great deal of moisture, and a wet puree will bubble up through the crumb layer instead of browning. Drain well, press firmly in a sieve or a clean towel, and let the puree steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before the butter goes in.
- Jerusalem artichokesSold now as sunchokes; they are the tubers of a sunflower relative and have nothing to do with globe artichokes. One pound of knobbly tubers pares down considerably, so buy a little extra, and drop the peeled pieces into acidulated water since the cut flesh discolours quickly.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The dish is already cooked through, so this is purely a browning step: 10 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler if the top is stubborn.
- Butter measureTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, half a stick. One ounce goes into the puree, the other is dotted over the crumbs.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes suits large whole tubers. Cut into even chunks they are tender in 12 to 15 minutes, and overboiled sunchokes turn watery and slack, which works against the puree.
- The saltSalt appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Season the puree along with the pepper, keeping in mind that a quarter pound of Parmesan is already a good deal of salt.
- Scallop shellsReal or china scallop shells were standard individual bakeware in this period. Ramekins or small gratin dishes do the same job; the mixture will fill four to six of them.
- YieldServes three or four as a side dish.
- A note on digestionSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people find gassy in quantity. A modest portion is the sensible introduction.
Jerusalem artichokes reached Europe from North America in the early seventeenth century and were widely grown before the potato displaced them; the name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, rather than to any connection with Jerusalem, while "artichoke" reflects a supposed likeness in flavour to the globe artichoke's heart. By the time meatless cookery books appeared in Britain and America around the turn of the twentieth century, the tuber had become a slightly old-fashioned winter vegetable, cheap and easy to grow, and enriched with butter and a heavy hand of Parmesan it gave something rich and browned. Serving such purees in scallop shells was a common trick of the period for making a humble root look like a course.