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Jerusalem Artichokes, Rissole
Peel, wash and drain twenty-four medium-sized, fresh, sound Jerusalem artichokes. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, place artichokes in the pan and fry them to a nice brown colour all around. Sprinkle over a light teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Set in oven twenty-five minutes. Remove with a skimmer, dress on a deep hot dish; sprinkle over a half teaspoon chopped parsley. Remove fat from pan, add one ounce butter, thoroughly heat, then squeeze in juice of half a sound lemon, lightly mix, pour it over the artichokes and serve.
A straightforward pan-and-oven treatment of sunchokes finished with a lemon-butter pan sauce. A few of the measures and one unstated oven temperature need filling in.
- What "rissole" means hereFrom the French rissolé, meaning browned in fat rather than a stuffed pastry. The point of the dish is deep, even colour on all sides before the tubers finish cooking through in the oven.
- Jerusalem artichokesThese are sunchokes, the tubers of Helianthus tuberosus, unrelated to globe artichokes. Twenty-four medium ones will come to somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 lb, depending on size; look for firm, unshrivelled tubers with tight skin.
- PeelingThe knobs make peeling slow. Choose the smoothest tubers, or scrub well and leave the skin on, and drop the peeled ones into acidulated water since the cut flesh browns quickly.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper. With the "light teaspoon" of salt this is well seasoned for 2 lb of vegetables.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderately hot oven, somewhere in the region of 375-400F, should finish them in the stated twenty-five minutes without drying the browned surface; test with a knife tip, as sunchokes go from firm to collapsing fairly abruptly.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard browns cleanly and stands the heat needed. Clarified butter or a neutral oil works; whole butter is more likely to scorch before the tubers colour.
- The finishing butterMelt the ounce of butter in the wiped-out pan only until it foams and just begins to smell nutty, then add the lemon juice. Taken further it turns bitter.
- Yield and a caveatServes four to six as a side. Sunchokes store carbohydrate as inulin, which is not digested in the small intestine and causes noticeable gas in some people; a modest first serving is sensible.
The Jerusalem artichoke is a North American sunflower, cultivated by indigenous peoples of the eastern woodlands long before Europeans recorded it, and carried back to France and Italy in the early seventeenth century. The name has nothing to do with Jerusalem: it is generally traced to a garbling of the Italian girasole, sunflower, while the "artichoke" half refers to a supposed likeness in flavour. The French called it topinambour. Turn-of-the-century American cookbooks aimed at the professional and ambitious household table drew heavily on Parisian restaurant vocabulary, and a plain browned root vegetable finished with butter and lemon, in the manner of a meuniere sauce, is exactly the kind of hotel-kitchen method those books were transmitting to home cooks.