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Jerusalem Artichokes, Persillade (Peel and wash well eighteen)
Peel and wash well eighteen good-sized Jerusalem artichokes; plunge them in a quart of boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for fifteen minutes. Drain on a sieve and place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter. Season with a saltspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper and cook them until a nice golden colour all over, turning them once in a while. Sprinkle a light teaspoon chopped parsley over, slightly toss and serve.
A straightforward two-stage vegetable dish: parboil, then brown in butter with parsley. The only real hazard is overcooking at the first stage, which leaves you with mush rather than something that will take colour in the pan.
- What the vegetable isJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the knobbly tubers of Helianthus tuberosus — no relation to globe artichokes. Eighteen good-sized ones is roughly 2 lb; they are often sold today as "sunchokes."
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of salt and white pepper for the pan seasoning, on top of the teaspoon in the boiling water.
- PeelingPeeling the knobs with a knife wastes a great deal; a firm scrub with a brush is acceptable and the skin is thin enough to eat. Whatever you do, drop them into acidulated water as you go, since the cut flesh browns within minutes.
- The fifteen minutesThis is the hinge. Sunchokes go from firm to collapsing quickly, and fifteen minutes suits large whole tubers only. Start testing at eight minutes with a knife tip and pull them while they still meet resistance — they finish cooking in the butter, and a fully tender tuber will not brown, it will disintegrate.
- Butter quantityOne tablespoon will not brown 2 lb of vegetables. Use three or four, or a mix of butter and a neutral oil so the milk solids do not blacken before the surfaces colour.
- CuttingLarge tubers benefit from being halved or quartered after boiling; the flat cut faces take a far better golden crust than round knobs, which only touch the pan in patches.
- PersilladeIn French usage a persillade is chopped parsley, usually with garlic, added at the very end. Add the parsley off the heat or in the last few seconds — held over heat it turns dull and bitter.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. Best straight from the pan; reheated sunchokes turn watery.
- A digestive noteSunchokes store carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which passes undigested and causes noticeable gas in many people. Modest portions on first acquaintance are sensible.
The name is a long-running mistranslation: the tuber is a North American sunflower relative, carried to Europe in the early seventeenth century, and "Jerusalem" is often said, though the derivation is contested, to be a corruption of the Italian girasole, sunflower, while "artichoke" came from a supposed likeness in flavour to the globe artichoke's heart. Europe took to it faster than America did, and it found a place in French and Italian cookery. The treatment here appears to follow what was a common nineteenth-century French handling of a firm root or tuber: blanch in salted water, finish in butter, finish again with parsley, a formula of the kind also used for other vegetables.