Home › The World's Kitchen › Jerusalem Artichokes, Espagnole
Jerusalem Artichokes, Espagnole
Peel, thoroughly wash and drain twelve Jerusalem artichokes, heat two tablespoons leaf lard in frying pan, arrange the artichokes in and slowly fry for fifteen minutes, or until a nice brown colour, turning once in a while; take up and place in a saucepan with one and a half gills demi-glace and one tablespoon Madeira wine. Carefully mix, season with half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne, cover the pan, then set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, place in a deep dish and serve.
A simple braise that lives or dies on the sauce: the artichokes are only fried and finished, so a real demi-glace does most of the work. Everything else is a matter of translating the measures.
- Jerusalem artichokesSold now as sunchokes — knobbly tubers of a North American sunflower, unrelated to globe artichokes. Twelve medium tubers is roughly 1 1/2 lb; scrub hard in the crevices, and hold the peeled ones in acidulated water, as they brown quickly.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of demi-glace is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for four servings — start with an eighth and taste.
- Demi-glaceThe recipe assumes a kitchen with brown sauce standing ready. Use a good reduced veal or beef demi-glace; a thin canned gravy will not coat the tubers or carry the Madeira.
- Leaf lardRendered fat from around the kidneys, mild and clean-tasting. Ordinary lard, clarified butter or a neutral oil all work; two tablespoons in the pan is enough to brown, not to deep-fry.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given at all; the recipe says only to cover the pan and set it in the oven. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for the final fifteen minutes, but it is our inference and not the book's instruction.
- Timing and donenessSunchokes are firmer than potato and can stay crunchy through both stages. Test with a knife tip after the braise; if the centres still resist, give them another ten minutes rather than serving them raw-hearted.
- MadeiraUse a dry to medium Madeira such as Sercial or Verdelho. It goes in with the sauce and gets fifteen minutes in the oven, which is enough to blow off the raw alcohol without cooking away the aroma.
- YieldServes four as a vegetable course alongside roast meat. Sunchokes are rich in inulin, which some people digest poorly — modest portions are wise on a first outing.
The tuber is native to eastern North America and has nothing to do with Jerusalem or with artichokes; the name is usually traced to a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, and the flavour has long been compared to artichoke hearts. "Espagnole" here points not to Spain but to the classic French brown sauce of that name, of which demi-glace is the reduced form — a dish labelled espagnole in a book like this one simply means finished in brown sauce. That such a plain root vegetable gets a Madeira-laced demi-glace might be read as characteristic of the period's hotel cookery, where sauce arguably served as the vehicle by which cheap produce reached a good table.