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Brussels Sprouts with Crisco
1/2 cupful Crisco 2 baskets brussels sprouts 1/2 cupful grated cheese Trim sprouts and cook them in boiling salted water till tender, drain and dry on clean cloth. Heat Crisco hot, then add sprouts, and fry until very hot. Turn them into hot vegetable dish, sprinkle cheese over them and serve immediately.
Sufficient for one dish.
A two-stage vegetable dish from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks: sprouts are boiled, dried, then fried hot in fat and finished with cheese. The method still works, and the drying step is what makes it work.
- "Two baskets"Greengrocers' produce baskets of the period were commonly around a quart, which would put each basket near a pound of trimmed sprouts. Two pounds total is a reasonable reading; the recipe itself says only "sufficient for one dish."
- CriscoStill sold, and still hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though reformulated over the last century to cut trans fat. Butter, olive oil or bacon fat all do the same job here; the book specifies Crisco because Procter & Gamble paid for the book.
- Half a cup of fatThat is a shallow-frying quantity for a heavy pan. Two to three tablespoons is enough to brown two pounds of sprouts if the pan is wide and hot, and the dish is less greasy on the plate.
- The hinge: dry them"Drain and dry on clean cloth" is the instruction that decides the dish. Wet sprouts steam in the fat instead of browning, and they spit. Blot them properly and let them cool a little before frying.
- Boiling timeThe recipe says only "till tender," and many cookbooks of the era gave sprouts a long boil. Four to six minutes in well-salted water, until a knife just enters the stem end, then drain at once; they finish cooking in the pan. Overboiled sprouts turn sulfurous and grey.
- Grated cheeseThe recipe does not say which. A hard, dry grating cheese is what the instruction implies, since it is sprinkled over hot sprouts at the table; finely grated Parmesan works well, while young supermarket cheese will slump rather than cling.
- HalvingNot in the original, but cutting larger sprouts in half through the root and laying the cut faces down in the fat gives far more browned surface than frying them whole.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which reached the market in 1911 as the first widely sold all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening; the book's recipes are built around it, which is why a plain vegetable side appears here under a brand name. Brussels sprouts are generally traced by name to the market gardens around Brussels, where they are said to be recorded from the eighteenth century. The treatment here, boiling followed by a hard fry and a dusting of grated cheese, is a standard continental handling of the vegetable that reads as thoroughly modern; the current fashion for roasting sprouts until the outer leaves char is working toward the same end by a different route.