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Pickled Artichokes
Rub off outer skin with a coarse towel, and lay in salt water for a day, drain and pour over them cold spiced vinegar, adding a teaspoonful of horse-radish to each jar.
This is a fresh-pack pickle with no cooking at all, which puts the burden on two things the original leaves vague: what vegetable is meant, and how strong the vinegar is.
- The artichoke in questionSkin rubbed off with a coarse towel means Jerusalem artichokes — sunchokes, the knobbly tubers — not globe artichokes, which have no skin to rub. Look for firm tubers with no soft spots; scrub rather than peel, and trim the worst of the knobs where grit collects.
- Spiced vinegarThe recipe gives no formula, so a standing house recipe is presumably assumed. Standard proportions are a quart of cider or white vinegar simmered briefly with a tablespoon each of whole mustard seed, black peppercorns, allspice and a few cloves, then cooled and strained. Use commercial vinegar labelled 5 percent acidity; nineteenth-century household vinegar varied wildly in strength.
- "Salt water" quantifiedA day-long brine at roughly 1/2 cup pickling salt to 2 quarts water draws out moisture and keeps the tubers crisp. Use non-iodised salt: iodine and anti-caking agents cloud the brine and can darken the pickle.
- Cold vinegar is the pointThe recipe is explicit that the vinegar goes on cold. Sunchokes soften when heated, so cold-packing likely helps keep their characteristic snap; there is no need to hot-pack them.
- HorseradishA teaspoon per jar means freshly grated root. Prepared horseradish from a jar is already in vinegar and much milder; use about a tablespoon if that is what you have.
- StorageWith no boiling-water processing and no measured acidity in the finished jar, treat this as a refrigerator pickle rather than a shelf-stable one. Keep it cold, keep the tubers submerged, and eat within a couple of months. For pantry storage, follow a current tested canning recipe instead.
- Timing and yieldGive it at least a week in the vinegar before eating; a few weeks will do more for the flavour. Two pounds of tubers fills roughly two pint jars and wants about a quart of vinegar.
Jerusalem artichokes are a North American sunflower relative, Helianthus tuberosus, and the name is a double misnomer — no connection to Jerusalem, and no relation to the globe artichoke, the "Jerusalem" element generally traced to a garbling of the Italian girasole, sunflower. They were grown in the American South as a low-maintenance garden and hog crop, spreading readily and lifted from the ground through the winter, which made them a cheap raw material for the pickle crock. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) gives a long chapter to pickles, vinegar, salt and spice being the means by which a household without refrigeration carried vegetables through to spring; a bare recipe of this kind suggests a reader who already had a formula for spiced vinegar to hand.