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Creamed Artichokes
Wash and boil artichokes with skins on in salted water for 1/2 hour. Drain, peel, and serve creamed with white sauce. It is more tasty to let the artichokes remain standing in the white sauce about 15 minutes before serving.
The key to this one is knowing which artichoke is meant. Boiling with the skins on and peeling afterward describes Jerusalem artichokes (sunchokes), not globe artichokes, which are never handled that way.
- Which artichokeBuy Jerusalem artichokes, sold now as sunchokes: knobbly tan tubers, not the thistle heads. Scrub them well in the folds, since grit hides there, and leave the skins on for cooking as directed.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour suits large whole tubers, but most supermarket sunchokes are smaller and will be tender at 15 to 20 minutes. Test with a knife tip; overcooked they collapse into mush and the skins will not slip off cleanly.
- PeelingPeel while still warm, holding them in a towel. The skin rubs away with your thumb or the back of a knife once cooked, which is the whole point of boiling them jacketed.
- Prevent darkeningCut surfaces brown quickly, so if you cut the tubers before boiling, a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar in the water helps keep the flesh pale. Boiled whole in their skins as directed, they need no acid.
- The white sauceThe book assumes you know it: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and pepper; nutmeg is an optional addition. That quantity dresses about 1 1/2 lb of tubers.
- The standing periodThe 15-minute rest is worth doing. The sauce thins slightly as the warm tubers give up moisture and the flavour penetrates; hold it covered over the lowest heat or in a warm oven around 200F rather than letting it cool.
- YieldFigure 1 1/2 to 2 lb of tubers for four as a side dish.
- A digestive noteSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people do not digest comfortably in quantity. Serve modest portions the first time.
Jerusalem artichokes are a North American sunflower tuber, cultivated by Indigenous farmers long before European contact and carried back to Europe in the early 1600s, where they were widely grown before the potato displaced them. The name is a double misnomer: nothing to do with Jerusalem, the word generally traced to a garbling of the Italian girasole for sunflower, though other origins have been proposed, and the artichoke half attached because the cooked flesh was thought to taste like an artichoke bottom. The tuber was a thrifty winter vegetable that home gardeners could dig as needed, and creaming in white sauce appears constantly as a treatment for boiled vegetables in American cookbooks of the period.