Cook the duckling the same as for Andalouse (No. 1930), and when done dress and surround it with a garnishing of glazed and peeled Jerusalem artichokes; serve with a separate sauceboat of half-glaze sauce (No. 413) worked with butter and finished with parsley and lemon juice.
Ranhofer writes in shorthand: the duckling itself is cooked elsewhere in the book, and this entry is really about the garnish and the sauce. Two components need attention, the artichokes and the finishing of the sauce.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty years' cooking at Delmonico's in New York, and its duck chapter runs through the classic French garnishes one after another — topinambours here, bigarade before it, oranges after. Topinambour is the French name for Helianthus tuberosus, a sunflower relative native to eastern North America that reached France in the early seventeenth century; the name is generally traced to the Tupinambá of Brazil, who were exhibited in Paris around the same time and became muddled with the plant's actual origin. The English "Jerusalem" is usually explained as a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though that account is traditional rather than documented. Whatever the tuber's standing in American kitchens by Ranhofer's day, the treatment here is unmistakably French: peeled, turned, glazed and ringed around the bird, it reads as a garnish rather than a root vegetable.