Purée de Topinambours

Purée de topinambours (Jerusalem artichoke purée) teaches a quiet but essential lesson: flavor and structure are separate jobs. The topinambour brings sweetness, earth, and the faint taste of an artichoke heart. Potato supplies the starch that lets the purée stand on the plate. It isn't filler. Without it, the purée slumps.

The old entry assumed a saucier, the sauce cook, tending pounds of roots over the fire and a tamis, a fine drum sieve, always within reach. Here 1½ pounds feeds four, a covered sauté pan provides gentle heat, and a sturdy fine-mesh sieve does the tamis work. The finishing butter remains exactly two ounces per pound of topinambours; the separate pan butter is measured because the entry calls for cooking the roots in butter but leaves that quantity to the cook. Brigade volume and the extra pair of hands were scaffolding. Cooking in butter, sieving, working in the full measure of butter, then adding potato and boiling milk are the dish itself.

Done properly, the purée is ivory-beige, glossy with butter, and soft enough to yield under a serving spoon while still holding a generous mound. The final milk decides it. Bring it to a boil and add it one spoonful at a time, because you can always loosen the purée, but you shouldn't ask it to swim.