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Jerusalem Artichokes
The best way to bring out the wild field flavor of this tuber of our indigenous sunflower that the Indians called sunroot and taught palefaces to eat, along with dried sunflower, pumpkin and squash seeds, is to peel the knobby little potatoes and boil them 15 minutes with a bit of butter and some salt, in not over-much water. Then eat them sluiced with melted butter and seasoned to taste. They are so delicate that French chefs class them with such fine foods as truffles and cocks' combs.
A plain boil-and-butter treatment of a vegetable now usually sold as the sunchoke. The only real technical demand is watching the clock.
- Timing is the hingeFifteen minutes suits tubers cut to even walnut-sized pieces; whole large ones may need 20. Sunchokes pass from crisp to collapsed very quickly, so start testing with a knife tip at 10 minutes and pull them while they still hold their shape.
- PeelingThe knobs make peeling wasteful. A stiff brush and a scrub under running water is enough for young, smooth tubers, and the thin skin is pleasant eating. If you do peel, drop them into water with a squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar, since the cut flesh browns within minutes.
- "Not over-much water"Enough to come halfway up the tubers, lid on, so they part-steam. The butter and salt go in with the water as written, and a covered pan keeps the flavor in.
- Buy them firmSunchokes go soft and shrivelled in storage, and limp ones cook to a woolly mush no matter how carefully you time them. Choose plump, taut tubers and keep them in the crisper in a paper bag for no more than a week or two.
- Inulin, and a warning worth passing onThe sweetness comes from inulin rather than starch, which many people digest poorly and noisily. A modest portion is the sensible first outing; long, thorough cooking is said to help, though a short boil breaks down only some of the inulin.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon on about 1 lb of tubers for three people as a side dish, with 2 to 3 tablespoons of melted butter for sluicing.
- Camp adaptationOver a fire, keep the pan at a lazy simmer rather than a hard boil; a rolling boil in a thin camp pot batters the tubers apart before the centers are done. Black pepper and a little lemon do more for them than any elaborate sauce.
Helianthus tuberosus is a North American sunflower, cultivated for its tubers by Indigenous peoples of the eastern woodlands long before European contact, and carried back to Europe in the first years of the seventeenth century, where it spread fast enough to appear in garden books within a generation. Neither half of the English name is accurate: the plant has no connection with Jerusalem, and the usual explanation is that the word is a corruption of the Italian girasole, "turning to the sun" — an etymology repeated for centuries but generally treated as traditional rather than proven. The "artichoke" half is usually explained by the flavor, which reminded early European eaters of artichoke bottoms. The plant grows wild and freely across much of eastern and central North America, so that a forager with a trowel and a pot could have a vegetable course without carrying one.