Home › Vegetables › Jerusalem Artichokes
Jerusalem Artichokes
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 lb. artichokes 2 tablespoonfuls flour 1 yolk of egg 2 teaspoonfuls lemon juice 1½ cupfuls milk 13/2 2 tablespoonfuls cream Salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 1/4 cupful vinegar 1 pint boiling milk Wash and scrape artichokes, and throw each one in cold water containing vinegar; when all are done, rinse in water and put into boiling milk, add cupful of boiling water and teaspoonful of salt. Boil quickly with lid off, pierce with fork to know if done. Lift into hot dish and cover with sauce. Blend Crisco and flour in saucepan, over fire, add milk, salt and pepper, and cook five minutes. Remove from fire, add egg beaten with cream and lemon juice, pour over artichokes and sprinkle parsley over top. Vegetables
A boiled root vegetable finished with a lemon-and-egg-enriched white sauce. The technique is sound; the main adjustments are the fat, the cooking medium and knowing when the tubers are done.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, so it appears where butter would otherwise go. Two tablespoons of butter makes a better-tasting sauce here; any neutral oil also works.
- The artichokes are not artichokesJerusalem artichokes are sunchokes, the tubers of a native North American sunflower, unrelated to globe artichokes. Buy about 1 lb of firm, unwrinkled tubers; a stiff brush and a paring knife handle the knobs better than a peeler.
- The vinegar bathThe quarter cup of vinegar in cold water is an acidulated holding bath to stop the cut surfaces browning while you work through the pile. Drop each one in as it is scraped, then rinse before cooking.
- Boiling in milkA pint of boiling milk plus a cup of water and a teaspoon of salt is the cooking liquid, not an ingredient of the sauce. Milk scorches easily, so keep the heat moderate rather than the rolling boil the text asks for, and watch the pan.
- TimingSunchokes go from firm to collapsed quickly and unevenly. If you cut them to a uniform size, start testing with a fork at around 10 minutes; whole tubers as the recipe leaves them will take longer, so go by the fork rather than the clock. Overcooked ones turn to mush in the serving dish.
- The sauce hingeThe egg yolk, cream and lemon juice go in off the heat. Return the pan to a burner after that and the yolk curdles and the acid can break the sauce; residual heat is enough to thicken it.
- Sauce quantityRoughly 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour and about 1½ cups milk gives a pourable coating sauce. Cook the roux and milk together the full five minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- YieldA pound of tubers serves three or four as a side dish.
Jerusalem artichokes have nothing to do with Jerusalem: the name is generally traced to a corruption of girasole, Italian for sunflower, the plant whose tubers these are. Native to eastern North America and long cultivated by Indigenous peoples, they were carried to Europe in the early seventeenth century, took hold there as a field crop, and returned to American kitchens as a somewhat old-fashioned vegetable. Their presence in a 1913 promotional cookbook for Crisco is telling: the shortening was new and had to prove itself in every corner of the kitchen, so the book worked methodically through what appears to have been a familiar range of dishes, including modest boiled vegetables in white sauce, substituting the new fat wherever butter or lard had stood. The tubers store inulin rather than starch, which is why they taste faintly sweet and why some people find them hard to digest in quantity.