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Jerusalem Artichokes
1 quart peeled and cut artichokes 1 pint milk 1 small onion 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon salt Wash and peel the artichokes and cut them into small cubes; put in a double boiler; cover with milk; add the onion and cook twenty minutes. Beat the butter and flour together and stir them into the milk; add the seasoning and cook for a half hour longer.
A plain creamed vegetable in the style of the period, thickened with a butter-and-flour paste rather than a made roux. The one thing to get right is the double boiler: milk against direct heat will scorch and the long cooking time assumes gentle, indirect steam.
- What the vegetable isJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, and are unrelated to globe artichokes. They are usually sold as sunchokes now; look for firm, unwrinkled knobs.
- QuantityA quart of peeled cubes is roughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 lb of tubers before trimming. Serves four as a side dish.
- PeelingThe knobby shape makes peeling wasteful; a stiff scrub and a thin paring is enough, or scrub well and leave the skin on. Drop the cut cubes into water with a squeeze of lemon, as the flesh discolours quickly.
- The onionThe recipe gives no instruction beyond "1 small onion," so it is unclear whether it was meant to be chopped in or left whole and lifted out. Leaving it whole or halved keeps it easy to remove if you do not want it in the finished dish.
- Double boilerKeep the water below the boil and the milk barely steaming. Cooking milk over direct heat here will catch on the bottom and taste burnt long before the tubers are done.
- Cooking timeFifty minutes total is not the error it looks like. Sunchokes hold their texture stubbornly and are still slightly crisp at twenty minutes; test with a knife tip and stop when they yield, which may be sooner in thin cubes.
- ThickeningButter beaten with flour is beurre manié; add it in pieces, and stir until it disperses so the sauce does not go lumpy or taste of raw flour.
- A note on digestionSunchokes store carbohydrate as inulin, which many people find gassy. A modest first helping is sensible if they are new to the table.
Jerusalem artichokes are a North American plant, cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the eastern woodlands and taken to Europe by early colonists, where they were grown widely before the potato displaced them. The name has nothing to do with Jerusalem: it is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, the plant being a species of sunflower, while "artichoke" was attached because seventeenth-century writers thought the cooked tuber tasted like an artichoke bottom. By this period the plant had settled into American kitchen gardens as a cheap, hardy winter root that kept in the ground until wanted, and it is treated here exactly as any other root of the era would be creamed in milk with an onion and a butter-and-flour thickening.