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Perhaps the only vegetable native to North America that has achieved worldwide acclaim, the Jerusalem artichoke is more appreciated overseas than in its center of origin in south-central Canada and the midwestern United States. Its estrangement from its homeland is perhaps best indicated by the fact that this openauk or “Canada potato” is now called Jerusalem artichoke, even though it is neither an artichoke nor native to Jerusalem. Worse yet, in the last half century, hundreds of heirloom variet-ies that were carefully selected by American family farmers and gardeners for their distinctive flavors, textures, and hardiness have been all but replaced by the sunchoke, a single sterile hybrid made between sunflowers and Jerusalem artichokes.

Remnant wild populations can be found in forty-four states and seven Canadian provinces, but within

that range, the historic heirloom cultivars such as Jack’s Copperclad have grown increasingly rare. This variety has plump but knobby tubers whose skins are colored a lovely dark copper or rose-purple. The tubers themselves have an excellent, subtly sweet flavor and are found at the base of ten-foot stalks that bear aboveground a bright display of sunflow-ers. Jack’s Copperclad is commercially available only from Horus Botanicals in Salem, Arkansas, and is endangered. Many other heirlooms of the same ilk are literally lost within the rural-suburban contin-uum, no longer known by their historic names nor celebrated for their unique qualities.

And yet this perennial tuber-bearing sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus) was once one of the most widely used root vegetables in North America, whether wild-harvested or intentionally cultivated

in fields and gardens. At least fifteen tribes boiled or roasted the tubers, sometimes eating them whole but other times mixing them with acorn meal to fry into cakes. We can assume that some prehistoric tribes intentionally transplanted and tended the tubers, for Samuel de Champlain saw them growing in Native American gardens at Mallebarre on Nauset Harbor in Massachusetts on July 21, 1605. Botanist Asa Gray discerned that the Jerusalem artichoke originated west of the Mississippi watershed and that it was probably carried and transplanted eastward through Native American trade. However, most indigenous harvesters within its natural range had no need to intentionally plant it because their practice of “digging-stick cultivation” enhanced the productivity of each tuber patch. Over time, there may even have been selection for larger tubers or different shapes or flavors. Various “wild” populations of Jerusalem artichokes have been reported to tolerate freez-ing temperatures, waterlogging, acidity, alkalinity,

Jack’s Copperclad Jerusalem Artichoke

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different photoperiods, sand, shade, lateritic soils, virus, bacteria, or weeds.

One of the first written reports about this root vegetable came from Thomas Hariot, during the second expedition to establish the first “English plantation” on Roanoke Island in 1585:

Openauk are a kind of roots of round forme, some of the bignes of walnuts, some far greater, which are found in moist & marish ground growing many together one by another in ropes, or as thogh they were fastened with a string. Being boiled or sodden they are a very good meate.

By 1605, the explorer Samuel de Champlain had enjoyed their flavor frequently enough to want to send some of the tubers back from Canada to his native France. It may be that he had already gathered or described this plant in Massachusetts as well, for a book published in 1609 mentions that this vege-table was known in France even before Champlain had initiated his exploration of Canada. Among the French, the vegetable that Champlain likened to an artichoke became known as topinambour—a country bumpkin—while the English settling north of the St. Lawrence River claimed it as the Canada potato.

Exactly when and how the term Jerusalem became added to this artichoke’s name remains a mystery. One explanation is that once this root became a staple food for the Pilgrims, they praised it as the new food that would nourish a “new Jerusalem.” Alternative explanations are that “Jerusalem” is simply a mispro-nunciation of the Italian word for sunflower, girasol, or of the Dutch place-name Ter-Heusen, a farm village in Holland where many of these tubers were planted. In any case, the Jerusalem artichoke or topinambour has met with three centuries of acclaim in Europe, and many of the most widely propagated cultivars come from there. The 1833 edition of Gerard’s Herball underscores how prolific this plant was in the eyes of the Europeans:

This wonderfull increasing plant hath grow-ing up from one root, one, sometimes two, three or more round green rough hairy straked stalks, commonly about twelve foot

high, sometimes sixteene foot high or higher . . . producing from the increase of one root, thirty, forty, or fifty in number or more.

Back in the United States, it was at least appreci-ated as a survival food, as this April 9, 1805, entry from the journals of Meriwether Lewis indicates:

When we halted for dinner [Sacagawea] busied herself in serching for the wild arti-chokes . . . this operation she performed by penetrating the earth with a sharp stick about some small collections of drift wood. Her labour soon proved successful, and she procurrd a good quantity of these roots.

And yet other American observers gave the plant decidedly mixed reviews. In 1681, Reverend John Banister of Virginia was already discounting its value in his Natural History, claiming that “the Batatas Canadensis, or Jerusalem Artichokes are little esteemed of here, yet it is sometimes used to brew with when corn is scarce.” In 1768, Miller wrote this disparaging note in The Gardeners Dictionary: “The Jerusalem Artichokes . . . are very subject to trouble the belly by their windy quality, which hath brought them almost in decline.”

John Goodyer, who had pioneered their cultivation by English-speaking farmers in the 1600s, was more to the point: “In my judgement, which way soever they be drest and eaten they stir up and cause a filthie loathesome stinking winde with the bodie, thereby causing the belly to bee much pained and tormented, and are a meat more fit for swine, than men.”

The source of that “windiness” may also be the tubers’ greatest asset for modern consumers, for it is due to the slow release of inulin, a complex poly-saccharide they contain. Slowly digested and broken down into fructose and other carbohydrates, inulin serves to protect those who suffer from diabetes from dramatic changes in blood sugar levels and from pancreatic stress.

Fortunately, the Jerusalem artichoke still had a few champions, including none other than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In a May 2, 1817, letter to an agricultural magazine editor, Tristan Dalton, Jefferson favored this native tuber (or intro-duced varieties of the same) as a winter feed for live-stock: “With respect to field culture of vegetables for cattle, instead of the carrot and potato recommended by yourself, and the magazine, and the beet by others, we find the Jerusalem artichoke best for winter.”

During the decades immediately following Jefferson’s promotion of it, a good number of vari-

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eties of the Jerusalem artichoke were selected, and these revived interest in the vegetable among chefs. In the 1847 cookbook The Carolina Housewife, there are instructions for pickling this kind of artichoke, and much the same recipe has persisted in the Carolinas to this day. In his 1865 classic, Field and Garden Vegetables of America, Fearing Burr noted at least four exceptionally flavorful varieties that had been developed by backyard plant selection:

For a long period there was but a single variety cultivated, or even known. Recent experiments in the use of seeds as a means of propagation have developed new kinds, varying greatly in their size, form, and color, possessing little of the watery and insipid character of the heretofore grown Jerusalem Artichoke, and nearly or quite equaling the potato in flavor and excellence.

From the early nineteenth through the early twen-tieth century, American gardeners and horticulturists selected and named over 1,300 forms, heirloom stocks, and unusual strains of the Jerusalem artichokes. Only 200 of these heirlooms have survived into the twenty-first century, and most of them are now available to the public only on a limited basis from experimental farms, botanical gardens, and germplasm reposito-ries. Aside from the sterile hybrid sunchoke, which can be propagated vegetatively only by replanting tubers, there are only ten cultivars of the Jerusalem artichoke that have persisted to any extent in garden catalogs of the United States and Canada: Boston Red, Dwarf Sunray, French White Improved, Fuseau, Golden Nugget, Jack’s Copperclad, Jerusalem White, Mammoth French White, Mulles Rose, Stampede, Sutton’s New White, and Veitch’s Improved Long White. Three are of particular interest as American heirlooms: the Boston Red, which has large knobby tubers with rose-red skin; Jack’s Copperclad, which has dark coppery purple, excellent-tasting tubers; and the Mulles Rose, which has large white tubers with rose-purple-fleshed eyes. All of these may now be considered endangered because of the predominance of sterile hybrid sunchokes in the marketplace.

The recipe included here is adapted from Joseph Earl Dabney’s fine collection, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine.

Further ReadingAmmundsen, C. Rene. “Jerusalem Artichoke.” In the “Homestead and Garden” category of the “This and That”

website. Accessed April 22, 2007, from www.fogwhistle.ca/thisandthat/artichoke.htm.

Boswell, Victor. R. Studies of the Culture and Certain Varieties of the Jerusalem Artichoke. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1936.

Burr, Fearing Jr. Field and Garden Vegetables of America. Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1865.

Champlain, Samuel D. The Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, 1604–1616. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1922.

Dabney, Joseph E. Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Nashville: Cumberland House Publishing, 1998.

Gray, Asa. Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States. New York: Ivison, Blakeman and Company, 1890.

Hariot, Thomas. 1588 Narrative of the First English Plantation of Virginia. London: B. Quatrich, 1893 (reprint).

Miller, Phillip. The Gardener’s Dictionary. London: privately printed, 1768.

Moulton, Gary E., ed. The Definitive Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Rutledge, Sarah. The Carolina Housewife, or House and Home, by a Lady of Charleston. Charleston, South Carolina: W. R. Babcock, 1847. Reprinted in Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1969.

Shoemaker, D. N. The Jerusalem Artichoke as a Crop Plant. USDA Technical Bulletin no. 33. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1927.

Waters, L., D. Davis, J. Riehle, and M. Weins. Jerusalem Artichoke Trials. St. Paul: Department of Horticulture, University of Minnesota, 1981.

1 gallon Jack’s Copperclad Jerusalem artichokes1 cup sea salt1 quart (4 large) green tomatoes, coarsely

chopped6 large red bell peppers6 large green bell peppers1 large rib pale green celery1 quart (8 medium) Vidalia onions 2 quarts apple cider vinegar½ cup bleached wheat flour3 tablespoons turmeric6 cups turbinado sugar½ cup dry mustard5 tablespoons mustard seed2 tablespoons dill seed 2 tablespoons celery seed

Scrub the artichokes with a brush to remove any spots. Place them in a large glass bowl and cover them with cold water mixed with ¼ cup salt. Refrigerate overnight. The next morning,

mince the tomatoes, peppers, celery, and onions, then cover them with water and the remaining ¾ cup salt in a second large bowl. Drain the arti-chokes, rinse them in cold water, then chop them coarsely. Drain the salt water from the minced vegetables but reserve this liquid.

Next, pour the apple cider vinegar into a large saucepan and combine the flour, turmeric, and sugar with the vinegar. Beat this mix with a whisk, then add the dry mustard and the mustard, dill, and celery seeds. Bring this mixture to a boil. Add the vegetables and bring all the ingre-dients back to a boil. Cook only 1 minute, stir-ring vigorously so as not to let anything stick to the pan. Finally, add the chopped artichokes and stir them in, but don’t let them cook any further. Pour the reserved liquid from the vegetables over the artichokes. Spoon the artichokes and liquid into hot, clean pint jars, filling them up to a quarter inch from the top. Seal at once. Yields 12 pints.

south CARolInA ChoW-ChoW WIth JACk’s CoPPeRClAd ARtIChokes

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