No. 257

Cream of Jerusalem Artichokes

Creme de Topinambours

Peel the artichokes, and afterward weigh two pounds of them, and mince them well. (Jerusalem artichokes can be imitated by using half artichoke bottoms, and half sweet potatoes.) Mince up one-quarter of a pound or two medium onions; fry them in butter, and then add the artichokes; fry also. Add two tablespoonfuls of flour, season with salt, sugar, and nutmeg, and moisten with two quarts of white broth. Boil and cook slowly until the artichokes are easily crushed; then drain and mash them; increase the volume of the puree with the broth the artichokes have been cooked in, strain through a sieve or tammy, and heat up without boiling; just when ready to serve thicken the soup with egg-yolks, cream and fresh butter (No 175). A garnishing is made of artichoke bottoms, cut into one-quarter of inch squares.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French velouté-style purée soup built on sunchokes and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The finish is the whole difficulty: once the yolks go in, the soup must never boil.

The vegetable"Topinambours" are Jerusalem artichokes, sold now as sunchokes — knobbly tubers unrelated to globe artichokes. Two pounds is the peeled weight, so start with about 2 1/2 lb. Drop them into acidulated water as you peel or they will grey.
Artichoke bottomsThe substitution and the garnish both call for artichoke bottoms, meaning the trimmed fleshy base of a globe artichoke with leaves and choke removed. Cooked frozen or good-quality jarred bottoms work; canned artichoke hearts packed in brine will need rinsing and will read sharper.
White brothWhite broth in this period is veal or chicken stock simmered without browning the bones, and lightly seasoned at most. Two quarts of a light, low-sodium chicken stock is the right stand-in. Season at the end, since the puree reduces and concentrates.
TammyA tammy is a tightly woven wool or linen straining cloth, twisted between two people to force purée through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, gives the same texture.
The liaisonNo. 175 is the cross-referenced thickening. For a soup this size, whisk roughly 4 egg yolks with a cup of cream, temper with a ladle of hot soup, then return it off the heat and stir over low heat to about 175F. Above 180F the yolks curdle and the soup will look grainy no matter how hard you strain it. Whisk in 2 to 3 tablespoons of cold butter last.
Sugar and nutmegA teaspoon of sugar at most; sunchokes are already sweet and inulin-rich. Nutmeg here is a scrape, not a measure — enough to be sensed and not identified.
InulinSunchokes store their carbohydrate as inulin, which many people digest poorly. Serve modest portions, and expect two quarts of finished soup to stretch to eight to ten small bowls in a longer menu.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in French classical order — hence a soup listed by number, by French name, and by its position in a run of cream soups. The Jerusalem artichoke is a North American sunflower tuber, cultivated long before European contact and carried back to Europe in the early 1600s, where the French named it topinambour, a name generally traced to the Tupinambá people of Brazil who were exhibited in Paris around the same time; the English "Jerusalem" is usually explained as a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though that account is traditional rather than documented. Ranhofer's parenthetical note that the tuber can be "imitated" with artichoke bottoms and sweet potatoes says something about supply: even in a market city, a seasonal tuber could not be counted on, and a hotel kitchen needed a soup that could appear on the card regardless.