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Brussels Sprouts
Pick, trim, and wash a number of sprouts. Put them into plenty of fast-boiling water. The sudden immersion of the vegetables will check the boiling for some little time, but they must be brought to a boil as quickly as possible, that they may not lose their green colour; add a table-spoonful of salt, keep the saucepan uncovered, and boil very fast for fifteen minutes. Lose no time in draining them when sufficiently done; and serve plain, or with a little white sauce over the top. Cost, from 2d. to 4d. per pound, according to the season. Sufficient for a dish, one pound.
A straightforward boiled vegetable from the era when green vegetables were cooked far longer than we cook them now. Only the timing and a couple of the conventions need translating.
- Cut the time roughly in halfFifteen minutes at a hard boil will leave sprouts soft and sulphurous. Small sprouts need 4-5 minutes, large ones 6-8; test with the tip of a knife at the base, which should meet slight resistance.
- Why the pan stays uncoveredThe instruction is sound. Leaving the lid off is usually explained as letting the volatile acids and sulphur compounds released by brassicas escape rather than concentrate in the pan, which is held to preserve both colour and flavour. Keep the lid off and the water at a rolling boil.
- Plenty of water, and keep it boilingThe point of "plenty" is thermal mass: enough water that the sprouts do not drop the temperature for long. Four to five quarts for a pound is ample, and adding them in one go rather than a handful at a time helps.
- The saltA tablespoon in a large pan of water is about right by modern standards too, though it is seasoning the water rather than the sprouts and most of it goes down the drain.
- Draining promptly"Lose no time" matters because sprouts carry heat and keep cooking in their own steam. Drain hard, shake the colander, and dress or serve at once. If you are holding them, plunge into iced water and reheat in butter.
- White sauceA plain bechamel: butter and flour cooked together, milk whisked in, simmered until it loses the raw flour taste, seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. The recipe asks only for 'a little' over the top, so a quarter pint for a pound of sprouts is nearer the mark.
- TrimmingRemove loose outer leaves and pare the stem end; there is no need to cut a cross in the base unless the sprouts are unusually large, and on small ones it only lets them fall apart.
- Yield and costA pound serves three to four as a side dish. The '2d. to 4d. per pound' is pre-decimal pence and is useful only as an indication that sprouts were a cheap seasonal vegetable, the price varying with the season.
Brussels sprouts take their name from the region around Brussels, where they are generally traced to market gardens of the Low Countries; they reached British kitchens in quantity during the nineteenth century and by the time this entry was compiled they were a routine winter vegetable, cheap enough to be quoted by the pound in pence. The entry is really a lesson in boiling green vegetables: hard boil, no lid, salted water, immediate draining — the standard English method of the period, applied to cabbage, peas and beans alike. What has changed is not the method but the tolerance for length; a fifteen-minute boil was normal when vegetables were expected to be thoroughly tender, and the modern preference for a firm sprout is best seen as a later correction rather than a rediscovery of anything older.