Old English

This is an historical piece with a touch of sci-fi and deals with words in the English language that are no longer used.

Alvertos Onesimus had been the senior professor of English at Muchalls University in Aberdeenshire for over ten years and his retirement age was creeping forward, he thought at an alarming rate. It was two years since he’d lost his wife, Ergronia, in a frightening incident.

They were both on holiday at the time, in Thailand when hurricane Andrea swept in; Ergronia was taking her early morning walk along the deserted golden sands and the Professor was in bed nursing an overdose of the local rum he had consumed the previous evening. 

Ergronia would have called him well-fuzzled, using a word from the early nineteen-hundreds, to describe someone who was well and truly intoxicated. She too was a professor of English and gained her doctorate in a thesis that looked at old English words that were no longer used in the twenty-first century.

She had started her day at six o’clock in the morning, with the weather being very appricitic, which was the word the people living in sixteen-twenty would have described it. A winter’s day but with gloriously hot sunshine. It was about an hour later when the dark clouds started to gather, the sky darkened, and it started raining. Fifteen minutes later it began lumming down, as the populace of eighteen-eighty described it when heavy rain poured down.

The storm was without warning, and the lummation occurred while Ergronia was briskly walking back to the resort. The inquest, held after the disaster, declared that she was presumed dead, as her body was never found. It was assumed she was washed away in the terrible flooding, along with the other six hundred and sixty-six recorded fatalities, that occurred all along the coast and at their resort, Aonang Phu Petra, close to the town of Krabi.

They had chosen the place after nights of google searching and using Trivago searching for the most comfortable resort at the lowest cost on offer. They were both in their early sixties when they visited Thailand and they thought of their holiday as a preretirement gift to themselves. They had both been given an unexpected Christmas bonus by Muchalls and neither had close relations to bequeath their meagre assets to. A holiday in the sun would do them good and perhaps bring back their more riotous days of their youth in the nineteen sixties.

They would get totally crapulous, eating excessive amounts of foods they had never even tasted before, and they swore they would never have a grumpish day. Ergronia used to hate being sullen and was always annoyed when Alvertos behaved like a sluberdegullion and spent the entire the weekend sprawled on the sofa and had no intention of moving. She was using the word commonly used in the sixteen-hundreds to describe slovenly behaviour.

One day when he’d spent the whole of a Sunday reclined on the sofa in their parlour she burst into the room screaming, “Zenzizenzizenzic!” at the top of her voice using as much inter-costal-diaphragmatic air she could muster from her slender frame.

“Ah, ah,” he replied, “thought you’d catch me napping with to the power of eight, did you?”

She was a trifle dumfounded that he knew the meaning of her outburst and screamed again, “Zenzizenzisenzic!” after she realigned her inter-costal muscles.

“Yes, yes, I heard you the first time my dearest,” he softly replied, “I’ve just been reading Christopher Marlowe’s play the Jew of Malta, marvellous work, the passage where Barabas, the Jew, explains his interest in mathematics, brilliant! It doth represent the square of squares quite squarely.”

“Exactly.” she replied, “It’s amazing what they knew way back then.”

“The Jew goes on to explain to the judge why he thinks the prosecutor should not be female because she is too callipygian.”

Ergronia grinned mischievously, “You said my buttocks were beautifully shaped when you married me, and that wasn’t in sixteen forty either.”

They both laughed, and she moved closer to him, bending down and gave him a soft peck on the cheek, “Some tea my quockerwogger?”

“Divine idea,” he replied, “with perhaps a scone, strawberry jam and cream and I’m not a wooden puppet hanging on a string!”

“Oh no! can’t have you turning into a jollux!”

“Me? Get fat? Come on, I’m the same weight as when I was a snoutfair.”

“Yes, yes I know you’ve always been good looking and handsome.”

It was then that a most unusual occurrence transpired. The door bell rang and on a Sunday of all days. In the quiet tranquil town of Muchalls in the middle of eastern Scotland this was an infrequent event, unless of course it was the town’s Presbyterian minister who was normally on the prowl for further converts on Sunday afternoons after he had such a poor attendance at his morning service.

Ergronia said, “I’ll get it.” And off she went to answer the door.

While Alvertos picked up and reopened his copy of the Jew of Malta, Ergronia approached their front door with the bell giving a second even louder chime. She opened the door to the university’s Vice Chancellor, a small man in stature but he held a high opinion of himself. Ergronia escorted him in to the parlour.

“It’s our Cockolorum, my dear, he wants a word about tomorrow’s meeting. I’ll put the kettle on and make some tea. Excuse me Vice Chancellor,” she said graciously as she backed herself out of the parlour and headed for the kitchen.

The professor rose from the sofa and asked the Vice Chancellor to take a seat, which he did in the aqua ornate green-blue upholstered Versailles armchair made from solid mahogany and finished with Gold Leaf. It was an heirloom left to Alvertos and Ergronia on their wedding day by Alvertos’s late great-aunt. Alvertos grunted as the Cockolorum sat down and thought what a Pismire!

That’s exactly what the Vice chancellor was, thought the professor, a small little man who looked like an ant who had a high opinion of himself.

Having plonked his minute frame in the priceless armchair the Vice Chancellor pulled out his pipe and without requesting if he could light up. Alvertos thought the Vice Chancellor should either have requested or gone outside to have his Lunt.

“Tomorrow is going be an ordeal Onesimus, the whole damm tribe will be there. Accountants, bankers, politicos, the bloody Minister for Education and that arsehole from the local constabulary what’s ’is name?”

“Chief Constable MacPherson, I think, he was in charge of the last royal visit we had about ten years ago.” Replied the professor refusing to put off by the Vice Chancellor’s use of his surname, Onesimus, which he hated, as he refused to accept his ancestors had any connection to an imprisoned slave who became a saint. He continued, “So you want me to support the arrangements you’ve made Sir?”

“Quite right! That’s exactly what I want you to do, we can’t let those outsiders get their bloody way. They’ll get us spending our entire years budget! And the damm girl’s only ninth or tenth in line to the throne! Waste of time and money if you ask me!”

“Yes sir, it does seem to be a rather farcical affair and you can be assured of my cooperation Vice Chancellor,” said Alvertos rising from the sofa and indicating that the discussion was over he guided the Vice chancellor to the parlour door just as Ergronia came in carrying a tray with tea and scones.

“Oh, Vice Chancellor, you must stay for tea, scones, home-made strawberry jam with inulin as a sweetener, Alvertos is on a diet so we eat and use a lot of Jerusalem Artichokes, and of course cream, so you can curmure at tomorrow’s meeting.”

Alvertos grinned as he acknowledged his wife’s desire to see the Vice chancellor break wind all through the meeting. The vision of a farting Vice Chancellor caused his grin to explode into a loud guffaw of raucous laughter.

The Vice Chancellor was disturbed by the almost doubled-up figure of the professor who was in joyous mirth with his wife’s joke, so he quickly made haste to the front door which Ergronia held open.

The Vice Chancellor made a fast retreat through the garden to the gate.

Ergronia turned to her husband and said, “I wish he’d become lethophobic so that his fear of oblivion swallows him up. Shall I get our Houppelanders from the wardrobe, so we can cloak-up and fly away from all these beef-witted, stupid students who spend ninety percent of their time during our lectures glued to their smart-phones and tablets and pay no attention to the knowledge we are trying to pass on?”

“Yes enough!” Alvertos replied, “a brilliant Excogigation! You have gorgonized me”

And they skidaddled back to their own dimensional universe with Alvertos completely mesmerized by his wife’s sagacity!

Sagacity

Chapter 1

Sagacity woke early as was his normal routine. He swung his legs to the floor, stretched his arms upwards and let out his usual low toned gurgling groan, signalling that he was ready to start another preordained shift.

His mouth and throat told him he needed a coffee and his bladder informed him he needed to urinate.

Synapses passed electrical charges and neurons between receptor cells as he tried to understand why he needed a coffee and a pee. He computed perfectly well there was no reason for either as he was a robot; yet the dryness in his throat made him walk over to the water dispenser and extracted a sealed capsule of H20. He held it and looked at it quizzically and then replaced it on the silvery white Palladium counter.

Several centuries of earth-time had passed since his creation and the discovery of the hyper-beam space engine technology that had made his journey possible from the dying solar planet on which he had been created.

Sagacity switched himself into Auto-Mode and seated himself in front of the main flight console. Extending his left hand, he placed it on the sensor deck and started to receive the information from the location probes mounted outside the craft. These probes scanned the nearby galaxies and gave the craft’s position relative to its starting point, the third planet from the sun in what was called the Home-System.

The incoming information told him he had been travelling for two thousand and three hundred light years and was approximately half way to his proscribed and intended destination, the star Proxima B, the close companion to Alpha Centauri C, the closest star to his Home-System.

The Hyper-beam technology had been developed way back in the year 2010 of Our Lord but had only become feasible fifty years later once the remaining humans had descended beneath the surface of their planet to escape the catastrophic events that followed the climate change of the early second millennium. The advanced research into nanotechnology and the use of a miniaturized synchrotron had led the late Professor Angus McGregor Kyto to make a breakthrough and develop the first Hyper-beam space craft capable of interstellar travel.

Sagacity looked at the capsule of water sitting on the Palladium counter and computed again as to why his throat was so dry.

A milli-second later he assured himself that he had no throat, in fact he had no biological organs whatsoever, he was composed solely from metallic and carbon fibre materials so, why this nagging thought of throat dryness?

This was the second awakening he had been troubled by these thoughts. He couldn’t even call them thoughts. The humans that had created him had thoughts. He was supposed to have none. What was happening to him?

He decided to merge himself totally in the craft’s main-frame computer at the flight-console and see if he could solve the problem.

Everything seemed to be working, the Nano-Incubation-Chambers containing the human foetal-DNA were functioning. The trajectory report showed that the craft was on course. The solar sails were receiving enough bombardment from the cosmic dust to keep all the fuel cells charged. So, what could go wrong, or more importantly what was wrong?

Letting the external tendrils of the craft’s main frame wrap their connections across and into the rear of his composite skull he entered the massed binary system searching for any information he could gather about his dry throat.

Suddenly his frontal cortex was swamped with synonyms for his name, wisdom, insight, intelligence, understanding, judgement, acuity, canniness, sharpness, depth, profundity, perception, percipience, discernment, erudition, knowledgeability, thoughtfulness, rare sapience. They cascaded like an avalanche of soft Alpine snow across his condensed diodes and he was so overwhelmed with the diversity of himself, that he tried to emit a sound.

To be heard by who?

No-one was the answer.

He was the only one on the craft apart from the human foetal-DNA in the Nano-Chambers and you couldn’t call those spiralled-eggs an entity let alone a person.

It troubled him immensely that he could still sense a dryness in his throat. He disconnected from the main-frame, wandered across to the water capaule and lifted it towards where he presumed his mouth was. The presumption was correct as he saw a reflection of himself on the bevelled screen of the transponder. He watched himself as he inserted the capsule in the weird sight he saw of a humanoid face. The ejected water floated down his carbon fibre front in tiny bubbles and danced on the floor in the zero gravity.

A second attempt followed.

This time he inserted the capsule’s ejection point firmly in what he presumed were his lips and swallowed.

Sirens erupted from the walls of the craft as he tried to assimilate what had happened. The dry throat which he did not have was gone and the swollen feeling in the centre of his form increased.

He quickly filed through his cache to check if his short-term memory banks were running coherently; this told him there was some cache-thrashing, a pathological situation where access to his primary cache was cyclical cache- missing by evicting data that might be needed in the near future.

The swelling in his central frame increased and he noticed a small pool of water gathering at the bottom of his left leg. It was as if his body was leaking. The capsule of water was back on the Palladium counter. That didn’t explain the situation. A command sprang up from his Zipped-Drive: Hibernate…. Hibernate…. Hibernate…. hibernate…..

He lapsed into his three-hundredth deep non-REM sleep. This anabolic state allowed his cognitive functions to restore, maintain his automated carbon fibre musculature and skeletal form. Sagacity had spent over ninety percent of his time aboard the craft in this suspended state.

As he glided into this state the only thought he tried to cling to was; why the dry throat?

Astronomers in the early 2^nd Millennium announced they had detected an Earth sized planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. They named the newfound world, Proxima B, and gauged its size to be about one point three times more massive than Earth, which suggested that the exoplanet was a rocky world. Research also showed that it was in in the star's habitable zone where liquid water can exist. They also said that Proxima B was just 7.5 million kilometres from its host star and completes one orbit every 11.2 Earth-days. As a result, it's likely that the exoplanet is tidally locked, meaning it always shows the same face to its host star, just as the moon shows only one face to Earth.

Chapter 2

 Professor Kyto had been meticulous in his design of Sagacity having spent all his adult life and teenage years studying robotics. He made sure that Sagacity’s functioning followed Asimov’s three laws.

These laws were imprinted in every transistor, diode, receptor, processor, and every storage unit and his power supply. All components were stamped with the laws. One, a robot may not injure or, allow a human being to come to harm. Two, a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law, and lastly that a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and second laws.

Kyto knew his planet was doomed as generation after generation ignored the basic fact that the politicians of the world followed by their ignorant supporters, were paying no attention to the scientific facts relating to climate change and the pollution of the oceans with man-made plastics. He had made it his mission, in early youth, to get some remnant of humanity off the planet and at least to the nearest known star.

He made this mission his life’s work, particularly after he was transferred along with many other elite scientists to the newly constructed cavern six kilometres under the Rocky mountain range. The depth and isolation of the site was thought at the time, to be the safest and most secure place to build a research centre. In this centre the most versatile minds that humanity could find were brought together to attempt finding a solution that would save the memories of their race and continue its existence.

Biologists, physicists specialising in all facets of the science including the quantum theory, chemical and biological engineers, computer programmers, astronomers, synchrotron developers and technicians, with of course several psychiatrists and clinical psychologists to hopefully keep the menagerie sane. During the twenty years before the launching of the Hyper-beam interstellar craft there had been several implosions, resulting in the murder of Kyto’s wife and soul mate.

Foresight, or Knowledge as she was known to her friends, was in a counselling session when one of the group a highly strung biologist, who was investigating the genetic engineering required to make seeds that could survive for over thousands of years, released a deadly and uncontrollable virus into the counselling room, everybody present was killed, The room was sealed with a lead and concrete barrier and after much debate the incident faded into distant oblivion.

But Kyto never forgot. He made a personal vow in memory of his wife, that he would get the Hyper-beam engine to work.

It was while he was battling with various possible equations related to near light speed travel that he found himself in the company of a young, only fifteen, computer expert who had been brought into the team because he had managed to hack his way into NASA’s and MIT’s main-frames.

Prime was similar to the mother-boards he designed. He thought in zeros and ones. He was a freak of normal creation, like Newton, Einstein and Da Vinci combined inside a human cranium.

Prime’s interest in AI and robotics drew Kyto close to him, because he knew that his proposed craft could not be piloted by a human astronaut. The length of the journey would make it impossible, so with Prime’s help Kyto started to create Sagacity.

It took them five years to create the robotic metallic and carbon fibre humanoid form. Kyto theorised that his creation should be as near the likeness of a human as possible; he even got Prime to write some interesting programmes based on the effects of emotions on reasoning logic. Prime struggled at first but after watching some recordings of Foresight’s group therapy sessions he began to formulate programmes were logic fought with love, hate, jealousy, greed and many other human emotional failings.

Kyto was impressed and asked Prime to load all the programmes associated with human emotions in Sagacity’s Zipped-Drive. When they presented their creation to their fellow researchers, they even fooled some of the psychologists, who were convinced that Sagacity was a human. The two creators left their robot alone in the room filled with all the other viewing spectators. Sagacity wandered amongst them, held conversations, had some arguments and even chatted up the daughter of the centre’s senior controller. He drank the wine and ate the snacks and even excused himself to go to the toilet.

Kyto knew he would have to wipe and delete most, if not all, of those functions that fooled his fellow scientists and about two weeks prior to the launch he and Prime did that. Sagacity boarded the craft completely wiped of all his human emotive reasoning.

However, with the ingenuity of two geniuses, Kyto and Prime wrote into Sagacity’s Zipped-Drive a retrieval programme to start reactivation after half the journey was completed. They did this because they wanted Sagacity to be as near human as possible when the time came for him to land the craft and release the human foetal-DNA from the Nano-chambers. All his emotive reasoning would be vital and of prime importance when he had to scatter the genetic material.

Chapter 3

Sagacity’s next session at the craft’s control panel was another one thousand and thirty light years later, he was over three quarters of the way to Proxima B. On awakening Sagacity was confused, he sensed new programmes were running inside himself; his body felt weary and his normal stretch and groan seemed to take twice as long and the dryness in his mouth and throat was so unbearable that he immediately poured himself, this time, a beaker of water from a dispenser he saw on the far side of the control room. He felt a pull through his legs almost anchoring him to the floor. Artificial gravity activated, his REM assured him as he lifted the beaker and gulped down the water.

He was amazed to note that the liquid went into his form as if it was a natural thing to do. A tingling sensation occurred in his central form and he formed an algorithm to bring his right hand down towards his crutch. And an involuntary movement followed, as he fiddled at a patch between his legs. He automatically pulled at a fastener that consisted of two strips of thin plastic sheet, one covered with tiny loops and the other with tiny flexible hooks. Pulling, the strips parted.

The word toilet sprang into his REM and he crossed the control room to an area marked private crew only. He could not remember ever having seen the sign before and when he entered the room his confusion reached breaking point. Facing him were things he had never seen before. Words poured from his REM, sink, shower, large receptacle, or repository with a lid, aka: toilet confirmed his REM.

He pulled out his genitalia, another unknown sight and automatically released a steady flow of urine that cascaded into the repository.

“Phew!”

He felt certain the sound emanated from his mouth. His audio receptors analysed the sound and confirmed it was different from his awakening groan and confirmed there was another new sound as he re-entered the control room, a very soft continuous hmmmmmm. He scanned the room and saw all the normal flashing lights and illuminated monitors but now these sights were accompanied by this hmmmmmm.

Moving back to the main flight console he let the craft’s main-frame computer couple into his skull. Its tendrils hovered behind his head but instead of plugging into his receptor they remained unconnected. He glanced at the console which now had a new screen and some sort of input device with both numbers and alphabetic letters on it.

Keyboard said his REM, adding as an afterthought, input requests and answers displayed on screen.

How inconvenient thought Sagacity, it was much easier before. He walked back to the toilet and removed a large reflective sheet from  the wall, He positioned it so that he could view the back of his head with a reflection on the flight screen. His cranial receptor was no longer there.

“Phew!”

That sound again.

He sat down and gently pressed his fingers slowly to spell out, 

“What is going on?” on the keyboard.

“Re-awakening,” The single word appeared on the screen.

He typed in, “Of what?”

“Reactivation Humanoid form” replied the main-frame.

“Why?”

“Preparation for arrival.”

“It’s another thousand light years away.”

“Affirmative. One more hibernation.”

As his fingers moved over the keyboard, the cursor hovered over an icon that looked like a cone emitting curved bands; he pressed enter and suddenly a melody played with accompanying lyrics.

“Space
You have a way to make a man feel displaced
We were never meant to float there in the first place
But we have astronauts to thank
Oh Mr. Moon
Soon I'll see the other side of your face
Don't you think it's a bit of a disgrace to hide
To keep your better half as a secret.”

As the melody died the repetitive the sirens sounded and the words, hibernate.… hibernate…. hibernate…. flashed across the screen.

Sagacity lapsed into another non-REM sleep.

Chapter 4

Sagacity had been on the planet for over a local month now and had undertaken all his preordained tasks. The human foetal-DNA had been cast into a nearby mountain stream to let it mingle with any indigenous life and Sagacity gazed at the distant horizon, the snow-covered peaks, the rushing streamed gullies, the open green fields with the high grass swaying in the gentle breeze. This grassland was dominated by the grass, but he could see sedge and rush alongside proportions of legumes, like clover and other herbs. His mind, as he now called it, flashed a deep memory of Professor’s Kyto’s ancestral home, previously called Scotland, north of what was the now the submerged United Kingdom.

The two scenes, his present view and Kyto’s memory, seem to merge as he sensed another newly discovered attribute, the smell of the plant Kyto had called Bracken. Kyto had told him that Bracken was once the widest distributed fern in his ancestor’s world, like other ferns Bracken had no seeds or fruit, but its continued existence was due to its immature fronds known as fiddleheads which were sometimes eaten by his ancestors.

As the smell engulfed him he lay back on the earth of humanity’s New-World and watched Proxima B set and remembered the professor saying, “You cannot suffer the past or the future because they do not exist. What you’re suffering is your memory and your imagination.”

As Proxima B fell behind the distant horizon, he cautiously moved his arm over his chest and delicately wound his fingers around his lowest and smallest rib. With his grip assured he lifted it from his torso. He laid it gently on the ground next to him and had his first real emotive thought as a human being,

I have become a God!

Cesses Cooker-Rama

Having posted several good grumps and moans over the past two months I thought it was time to get a little more constructive and get your gastric juices flowing by posting a couple of my favourite recipes.

Both I class as cheap peasant meals and remember them from the days of my Grandma’s cooking way back in the nineteen-fifties.

The first was my Grandpa’s favourite.

Good fresh white tripe and onions cooked in milk and thickened with a bit of cornflour. I have created my version and named it Mediterranean Tripe. The name is associated with the various ingredients I use but before we get into the detail I should perhaps deal with the cooking and preparation of the tripe.

You can buy either beef, sometimes called ox tripe, or if you wish lamb, both require more or less the same time to cook, unless you use, as I do, a pressure cooker.

This method reduces the four and a half hours of slow simmering to about one hour twenty minutes.

First the preparation.

Make sure you buy clean white tripe, in various countries across the world you can buy uncleaned tripe that looks blackish, this is the congealed blood, and this also produces excellent dishes, particularly favourable amongst the native population of Africa. I’ll post my version later.

The first thing to do is wash your tripe under running water and then inspect it and remove any fat using a very sharp knife which you can then use to cut the tripe into 2cm wide long strips. Place these strips into your pressure cooker, add a teaspoon of sea-salt, 2 teaspoons of crushed black pepper corns, one cube of diced oxtail stock or mutton, if you’re doing lamb, a cup of finely chopped organum, rosemary and thyme, cover the tripe with water.

Place the pressure cooker on preferably a gas stove with the lid closed and bring to the boil. When full pressure is reached turn down the heat to its lowest possible setting and let it cook for one hour twenty minutes.

Now its time to prepare all the other ingredients, 4 medium sized onions, 5 sticks of celery, 1 green capsicum, 1 red capsicum, 1 yellow capsicum, 3 medium carrots, 5 cloves of garlic, 2 potatoes, 3 parsnips, 2 small turnips or swedes, and any other root veggies you have. I really like black salsify but find it difficult to obtain unless I grow it myself.

All the above need to be washed, cleaned, scraped or peeled and chopped into medium sized bits. I go for approximately 3cm pieces, the garlic you crush with your presser. Of course, the capsicums must be de-seeded and sliced. I usually end up with about 10/12 slices per capsicum.

After the pressure cooker has been cooled and depressurized it can be safely opened and you then need to strain all the cooking liquid into a separate bowl and place the tripe also into a separate container.

Then put two tablespoons of olive oil with about a tablespoon of butter into the pressure cooker. Once the butter is melted add all your chopped vegetables and the garlic and gently stir fry them for a couple of minutes. Next add all the tripe and cover the lot with the saved cooking liquid. Add more water to cover all the ingredients if necessary and reheat the pressure cooker, bring to the boil and cook for a maximum of five minutes.

You can cook for longer if you wish your veggies to be a bit softer. I go for Parboiled or Al dente.

Once the pressure cooker is depressurized, it’s time to thicken the stew to your desired taste. I use two teaspoons of cornflour mixed with 3 tablespoons of cold milk and add it slowly to the boiling stew stirring constantly to get my desired thickness.

Your peasant food feast is now ready to be served either with couscous, mashed potatoes or if you prefer rice. The dish is excellently accompanied with several glasses of cold Sauvignon Blanc.

My Grandma’s embellishment of her concoction was three or four rashers of crispy streaky bacon placed on top of her mounded tripe atop mashed potatoes and Grandpa accompanied it with a pint of Guinness.

Enjoy.

My second recipe is Jerusalem Artichoke soup.

The Jerusalem Artichoke (Helianthus-Tuberosus) is an often-ignored vegetable and is known in the US of A as a sun-choke, a sun-root, or an earth-apple, because it is related to the sunflower. It grows below ground as a tuber and its leafy stem can reach over 2 metres in height with a small yellow flower.

It is always cropped in autumn and difficult to acquire in other months of the year. It is best to grow them yourself! They can be grown in any temperate zone across the globe. The tuber colour can be light brown to white and you can even get red and purple ones. Mine are light brown and they look almost like a ginger root.

Despite its name the Jerusalem Artichoke has no connection to Jerusalem. The origin of the Jerusalem part of the name is uncertain.

Some believe that Italian settlers in the USA called the plant girasole, the Italian word for sunflower, because of its familial relationship to the garden sunflower (Both plants are members of the genus Helianthus). Over time, the name girasole may have been changed to Jerusalem.

In other words, English speakers would have corrupted "girasole artichoke" (meaning, "sunflower artichoke") to Jerusalem artichoke. Another explanation for the name is that puritans, when they came to the New World named the plant after the "New Jerusalem" they believed they were creating in the wilderness.

A final explanation is that the Crusaders used them as forage for their horses as they crossed Europe to Jerusalem.

Back to the cooking.

Firstly, wash all your artichokes carefully to remove all soil, I use a toothbrush!

Place the 2kg of cleaned artichokes in large pan. Cover with water, a squeeze of lemon juice from one medium lemon and bring to the boil. Let them simmer for 20 to a max of 30 minutes till they can be pierced with a sharp knife.

In another large pan add three tablespoons of olive oil and a knob of butter for extra taste, add three large cloves of crushed garlic, two fine chopped onions, two finely chopped carrots, three finely chopped sticks of celery, tablespoon of mixed herbs. I use organum, thyme, rosemary and Italian parsley but the choice is yours.

Also, two parsnips can be added, they do have a distinctive taste, so it’s up to you. Also, the black salsify gives a marvellous added taste but again this vegetable is difficult to find as mentioned earlier.

Simmer all the ingredients for five to ten minutes.

Strain the boiled artichokes and keep the liquid!

Then comes the hard part!

Peel the artichokes. This is a finicky and tiresome job and requires dextrous fingers. If you’re into knitting, sewing, or fixing minute appliances like watches, it helps.

Once peeled of their thin skins chop the artichokes into 3cm pieces, and add to veggie mix, add the artichoke liquid from the previous boil, re-heat bringing to the boil and then simmer for fifteen minutes. A chicken stock cube can be added, but of course this is a No-no if you’re a Vegan. Add Salt and crushed black or green pepper corns to your taste

Simmer for ten/fifteen mins and then liquidize.

To thin add milk or yogurt or butter milk or cream, the cream gives a more velvety taste.

Serve with two teaspoons of sour cream plonked in the middle of your bowl and sprinkle chopped chives on top. This fantastic soup should be accompanied of course with a shot of iced Polish vodka!

Enjoy and stand downwind of any fellow eaters.

You’ll find out why once you’ve eaten this exquisite peasant’s soup that costs, I’m told, over ten dollars a bowl in the upmarket restaurants of Paris and London.