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Cabbage, Savoy, and Brussels Sprouts
Wash and pick off the outer leaves. Place the vegetables in a pan of boiling water, to which has been added a handful of salt and a very small piece of soda. Let them boil quickly until tender. Drain the water from them, and serve as hot as possible. Pepper slightly, and spread a little butter over them. Send a little melted butter to the table with them, but not on them. Savoys should be drained from the water, and may be pressed into the dish, and cut in squares. The best way to keep greens a good colour is to put them into the saucepan when the water is boiling; keep them boiling fast all the time; let them have plenty of room and plenty of water; let them be uncovered, and take them up as soon as they are cooked. Time, ten minutes for sprouts, half an hour or more for savoys. Probable cost, 2d. per pound. Two pounds will be sufficient for four or five persons.
Sound advice on boiling greens, wrapped around two instructions modern cooks should ignore: the pinch of soda and the length of the cooking.
- Leave out the sodaA "very small piece of soda" is bicarbonate of soda, added to fix the green colour by neutralising the acids released in boiling. It works, but it also destroys most of the vitamin C and softens the cell walls into mush, giving cabbage its old reputation for sliminess. Salt alone is enough.
- The timings are far too longThe savoy timing is far too long -- half an hour will reduce a savoy to grey pulp. Shredded savoy needs 4-6 minutes in fast-boiling water; wedges 8-10. The ten minutes given for sprouts is about right for small whole ones; trimmed and halved they want 5-7 minutes and should still have some bite at the core.
- What is still worth followingPlenty of fast-boiling water, no lid, and lifting them out the moment they are done are all correct. The uncovered pan lets the sulphurous compounds escape rather than condensing back onto the leaves, and a big volume of water keeps the temperature from dropping when the greens go in.
- "A handful of salt"In a large stockpot of water this is not as reckless as it sounds - reckon on a tablespoon or so per litre. Very little is absorbed in a few minutes of boiling.
- "Melted butter" at tableIn a Victorian book this usually means the flour-thickened butter sauce, not simply butter melted in a pan. If you want the effect without the sauceboat, a knob of butter tossed through the drained greens does the same work.
- Pressing savoysThe instruction to press the drained leaves into a dish and cut them in squares is a service convention for whole boiled savoy. Press firmly to expel water or the squares will collapse on the plate.
- YieldTwo pounds for four or five people holds up; buy closer to 2 1/2 lb of sprouts if they are large and loose-leaved.
Both vegetables in this entry are named for places. The savoy - a crinkle-leaved winter cabbage - takes its name from the Duchy of Savoy in the western Alps, and was grown in English kitchen gardens as the reliable hard-weather cabbage by the seventeenth century. Brussels sprouts are traditionally traced to the market gardens around Brussels, where they were being grown in quantity by the late eighteenth century, and reached British tables as a fashionable novelty in the early nineteenth. Boiled greens were served at nearly every substantial dinner. The soda was the era's shortcut to a bright plate, and it survived in British cookery well into the twentieth century before nutritional analysis, and taste, saw it off.