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Baked Jerusalem Artichokes
Peel or scrape, and drop instantly into cold water, for the cut surface blackens on exposure to the air. Have boiling water ready, add 1 tablespoon vinegar to each quart of water to keep the tubers white, put them in, and boil 20-25 minutes, adding salt the last 10 minutes of cooking. Take up as soon as done. Spread with butter and eat at once.
A simple boiled tuber done camp-style, with one real trick: the cut surfaces oxidize almost as fast as you can cut them.
- Work into acidulated waterHave a bowl of cold water standing before you start peeling, and drop each tuber in as it is done. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar in that holding water helps as much as the vinegar in the pot.
- The vinegar is for colour onlyOne tablespoon per quart of cooking water keeps the flesh pale and does not flavour the finished tubers. Cider or white vinegar both work; skip it and you get grey-beige artichokes that taste the same.
- Watch the timing closelyTwenty to twenty-five minutes suits large whole tubers. Small or cut ones are tender in 10-15, and Jerusalem artichokes go from firm to collapsing quickly, so test with a knife tip from about 10 minutes on.
- Salt late, as writtenThe instruction to salt only for the last 10 minutes follows older practice; the reason usually given is that earlier salting firms the surface and slows cooking, though any such effect is slight. Salt the water generously when you do add it.
- Drain thoroughly"Take up as soon as done" means lift them out rather than let them sit in the water, which turns the skins slippery and waterlogged. A minute in the empty hot pot dries them off before buttering.
- Peeling is optionalThe skin is thin and edible; a stiff brush and a good scrub saves considerable time with knobbly tubers, and the recipe allows for scraping instead of peeling.
- YieldReckon about 6 oz of tubers per person as a side dish, so 2 lb serves four to five.
- A note on digestionJerusalem artichokes store carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which many people find gassy in quantity. A modest first helping is wise if the eaters are unfamiliar with them.
Jerusalem artichokes are the tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, a North American sunflower, and have nothing to do with Jerusalem or with globe artichokes. The name is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, with "artichoke" attached for the flavour of the cooked flesh; the plant was carried to Europe in the early seventeenth century and returned to American tables as a garden vegetable. The tubers keep for weeks in a sack, grow wild and half-wild across much of the continent, need no elaborate preparation, and cook in a single pot. The insistence on cold water and vinegar reflects a period when the pale look of a vegetable on the plate mattered a good deal more than it does now.