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Brussels Sprouts
Look over, remove wilted leaves from sprouts, cover with cold water, let soak one-half hour. Cook in boiling salted water until tender when pierced with a wooden skewer. Drain thoroughly, serve with melted butter, salt (if needed), and pepper, or reheat in thin Cream Sauce, allowing one cup Sauce for each pint of sprouts.
A plain boiled vegetable from a 1913 Sunday menu book, written for cooks who already knew what "tender" meant. Two details are worth updating: the soak and the cooking time.
- Why the cold soakThe half-hour soak in cold water was insurance against insects and garden grit in unwashed market sprouts. Bagged supermarket sprouts need only a rinse and a trim of the stem end; a soak this long waterlogs them.
- Cooking timeThe original gives none. Small sprouts take 6-8 minutes in boiling salted water, large ones 10-12. Test at the earliest point — sprouts boiled to full softness turn grey-green and sulfurous, which is often blamed for the vegetable's poor reputation through much of the twentieth century.
- The skewer testA wooden skewer through the stem end, not the leaves, is still the right check. It should meet slight resistance rather than sliding through.
- Salted waterUse about 1 tablespoon salt per 4 quarts. Keep the water at a rolling boil and the pot uncovered, which lets sulfur compounds escape rather than condensing back onto the sprouts.
- Drain thoroughlyThe instruction is emphatic for a reason. Water trapped between the outer leaves dilutes the butter or thins the cream sauce; shake the colander hard and let them sit a minute before dressing.
- Cream sauce proportionA "thin" cream sauce of the period is roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to 1 cup milk. The recipe's ratio — 1 cup sauce per pint of sprouts — is generous by modern taste; half that coats them adequately.
- YieldA pint of trimmed sprouts is roughly 10 to 12 ounces and serves three as a side dish. For six, plan on about 1 1/2 to 2 pounds untrimmed.
Brussels sprouts reached English and American tables well after cabbage and cauliflower, and the name records the region where they were long cultivated — market gardens around Brussels, where they are generally traced to the sixteenth century, though the modern tall-stalked form is later. In an American cookbook of 1913 they were still something of a specialty vegetable, sold on the stalk or loose in cold-weather markets; sprouts sweeten after frost and were among the few fresh green things a Northern household could buy in late winter. The two finishes offered here — melted butter, or reheating in thin cream sauce — are a common pair of treatments in period books for boiled vegetables, the cream sauce version presumably the more "company" option for a Sunday dinner.