Author: Linné, Family: asteraceae (compositae)
This root vegetable is more commonly known by the name of Jerusalem artichoke or topinambur.
It's not too well known, but you may find it on markets in autumn, especially where you get
biologically grown veggies. It looks something like small, knobby potatoes or ginger roots, and
has a delicious nutty taste.
Many people grow it in their gardens for its pretty flowers. When I was
a kid, we didn't even know that the roots were edible, we called it 'brush sunflower', and my father
one day decided to get entirely rid of it because of its tendency to spread all over the place.
Like its bigger relative, the sunflower, this plant is a native of North America, so it can't have
grown in Ice-Age Europe.
Photo by Brother Alfred Brousseau, St. Mary's College
(He doesn't say which species of helianthus it shows, but that's what helianthus tuberosus looks like.)
More about groundnut in MGMH
Text References: Food
| CB 16, 259-260 |
Ayla's Cave
In the immediate vicinity were also nuts, high-//bush cranberries, bearberries, hard small apples, starchy potatolike roots, and edible ferns. |
| CB 24, 391 |
Clan Gathering
Heaps of wild yams, white starchy breadroots, and potatolike groundnuts
boiled gently in skin pots slung over fires. |
| VH 1, 13 |
She added alfalfa and clover to her diet, and welcomed the starchy,
slightly sweet groundnuts, finding the roots by tracing rambling surface
vines. |
| VH 10, 165 |
After a meal of starchy groundnuts wrapped in leaves to roast, and
an assortment of edible greens stuffed in a giant hamster and cooked, she
set up her low tent. |
| VH 26, 437 |
She also dug up wild carrots, small and pale yellow, and white, starchy
groundnuts that were good raw, though she liked them better cooked.
(...) She (...) washed the roots, then brought them up and added them to a broth she had started using dry meat. She tasted it, sprinkled in some dried herbs, and divided the raspberries into two portions, then poured herself a cup of cool tea. |
| MH 3, 31 |
Many had stopped to pick at cold leftovers from the earlier meal which
had been brought in: small white starchy groundnuts, wild carrots, blueberries,
and slices of mammoth roast. |
| MH 8, 119-120 |
Winter Storage
"Roots and fruit are stored higher up," Talut said to the visitors,
pulling back another drape and showing them baskets heaped with // knobby,
brown-skinned, starchy groundnuts; small, pale, yellow wild carrots; the
succulent lower stems of cattails and bulrushes; and other produces stored
at ground level around the edge of a deeper pit. "They last longer if they
are kept cold, but freezing makes them soft." |
| MH 18, 274 |
Adoption Gift to Nezzie
The basket, divided into sections by flexible birchbark, was full of
food. There were small hard apples, sweet and spicy wild carrots, peeled,
gnarled roots of starchy groundnuts, pitted dried cherries, dried but still
green day-lily buds, round green milk vetch dried in the pod, dried mushrooms,
dried stalks of green onions, and some unidentifiable dried leaves and
slices. Nezzie smiled warmly at her as she examined the selection. It was
a perfect gift. |
| PP 2, 26 |
Dominated by grasses more than five feet tall but ranging up to twelve feet in height - big bulbous bluestem, feather grasses, and tufted fescues - the colorful forb meadows added a variety of flowering and broad-leaved herbs: aster and coltsfoot; yellow, many-petaled elecampane and the big white horns of datura; groundnuts and wild carrots, turnips and cabbages; horseradish, mustard, and small onions; irises. |
| PP 4, 51 |
Dinner for Two
She had washed and was cutting up cattail roots, and another white
starchy root with dark brown skin called groundnuts, preparing to put them
in a tightly woven waterproof basket half-full of water, in which the fat-rich
tongue was waiting. |
| PP 22, 383 |
Ptarmigan
Then she began to think about what she might stuff the cavities with.
(...) The big ground roots might be good, maybe with wild carrots and onions. |
| PP 30, 494 |
Feast for S'Armunai
Later she planned to mix in some dry roots - wild carrots, and starchy
groundnuts - plus other pod and stem vegetables, and dried currants and
blueberries. |
|
Abbreviations |
Editions |
| CB |
The Clan of the Cave Bear |
The page numbers refer to the hardcover editions by Crown Publishers, Inc, New York 1980, 1982, 1985, 1990.
Book 1-3 are the Special Collector's Edition, I don't know if the page numbers differ from those of the 'normal' hardcover editions. |
| VH |
The Valley of Horses |
| MH |
The Mammoth Hunters |
| PP |
The Plains of Passage |
| (...) |
omission |
Copyright |
| ... |
original in text |
All book quotes: © Copyright Jean M. Auel
The format and text contents of this site are the property of the author |
| MGMH |
'A Modern Herbal', by Mrs. M. Grieve |
Comments, suggestions, errors, anything else ... emails are welcome!
|
Author: Linné, Family: asteraceae (compositae)