Recently, I did my annual spring harvest/purge of jerusalem artichokes (aka sunchokes…easier to spell) from my garden. I had 7 gallons of the stuff this year. They sell for $3.25 lb at our local food co-op, so this was a real treat.
Oh, I hear you saying, “What’s a sunchoke?”
They are a root veggie, related to sunflowers. They get real tall: 6-8ft. with little yellow flowers appearing in the fall. Where ever one plants them, they tend to take over. I always suggest to plant them near a fence, or the side of a building, or the outer part of ones property. They make a nice natural fence for privacy and cover up ugly fencing or siding.
Sunchokes have a sweet, nutty flavor and similar in texture to a water chestnut and are very nutritious. They are delicious raw in a salad, or cooked like any other root vegetable: steamed, boiled, mashed, roasted, baked, souped or stewed. They are great in a stir-fry…the only thing you can’t do to them is french fry them.
Read about them at Wikipedia and find recipes for them at AllRecipes or your favorite cooking & food site.
I love sunchokes but usually give most of them away because they don’t keep for very long, and I haven’t figured out how to put them up. They may be a tuber but they don’t have much of a shelf life like other tubers. Instead, I dug them up, rinsed them, bagged them and offered the rest to friends and neighbors. We eat as much as we can stand, and whatever is left over, we replant in the ground.
The hubby, a bibliophile who loves to haunt used bookstores, recently brought home an old cookbook called Secrets of New England Cooking by Ella Shannon Bowles and Dorothy S. Towle (New York: M. Barrows and Company, Inc., 1947). I love old New England cookbooks and have quite a collection of them. This one is more than just a collection of recipes whereas there are several pages of food history at the beginning of each chapter. Right in the first chapter is a bit on sunchokes:
“Some of the early explorers found that the Indians on Cape Ann cultivated artichokes and used them in stews and soups. Usually the women cared for the gardens, but for some unknown reason the men raised the artichokes. The explorers liked the tubers and took some back to Europe where they became popular, especially in Spain. They were called girosoles, a word the rougher English tongue turned into ‘Jerusalem.’”
The book also gives a couple of sunchoke recipes including artickoke fritters. Boy, those old New Englanders could make a fritter out of anything!!
It is nice to enjoy the fruits of ones labor, and sunchokes are a great spring food (although they could also be harvested in the fall). I now await the growth of snap peas, spinach, and lettuce, all of which should be coming up soon.
Happy gardening!
Cranky