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Jerusalem Artichokes, Cream Sauce
Peel and wash twelve sound raw Jerusalem artichokes; plunge them into a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain, dress on a vegetable dish, pour a cream sauce over them and serve.
A plain boiled vegetable with a sauce, of the kind that assumes the cook already knows how to make a cream sauce. Two things need attention: keeping the peeled tubers from browning, and not overcooking them.
- What the vegetable isJerusalem artichokes are the tubers of a North American sunflower, unrelated to globe artichokes, and are now often sold as sunchokes. Twelve medium tubers is roughly 1 1/2 lb, enough for four.
- PeelingThe knobbly skin is thin and edible; a hard scrub will do if the tubers are young. If you do peel them, drop them into acidulated water at once, as the cut flesh discolours within minutes.
- TimingTwenty-five minutes suits large whole tubers, but pieces or small ones will collapse well before that. Test with a knife tip from about twelve minutes; they should be tender with no chalky centre and are best just short of falling apart.
- Cut them evenSunchokes vary wildly in size. Halve or quarter the big ones so everything finishes together, rather than boiling until the largest yields and the rest turns to mush.
- The cream sauceThe book leaves the sauce to the cook, assuming a standard white sauce is already known. A workable modern version: 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked without colour, 1 cup milk or thin cream whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little nutmeg. A squeeze of lemon lifts the sweetness of the tubers.
- Salting the waterA teaspoon of salt to a quart is on the light side for a dense root vegetable. Closer to a tablespoon per quart seasons them properly, since the sauce is the only other seasoning.
- A note on digestionThe tubers store carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which is why they taste faintly sweet and why they are notorious for causing wind. Small portions are the reliable remedy; long cooking is often said to help, though the effect is partial.
Jerusalem artichokes were cultivated by Native peoples of eastern North America long before European contact and were sent back to France and Italy in the early seventeenth century, where they were taken up quickly as a field crop for both people and pigs. The name is a puzzle only in its first half: the artichoke part comes from a supposed resemblance in flavour to the globe artichoke heart, while Jerusalem is generally traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, though that derivation is traditional rather than firmly documented. By the time this book was compiled the tuber had become a distinctly old-fashioned vegetable in English and American kitchens, kept alive in cookery books mainly by treatments like this one, boiled and masked in white sauce in the same manner as salsify, cardoons and seakale.