Laura Guerite
BRUSSELS SPROUTS-GUERITE
One quart of sprouts, boiled until tender; one quart of raw chestnuts, boiled in salt water until the shells split open.
Remove shells and add sprouts and chestnuts together. Cover with melted butter and sprinkle with paprika.
I discovered this recipe in Italy several years ago and you will find it makes a very wonderful dish.
Luly very Tuly yours Laura Suerite
A two-ingredient side dish written the way stage people wrote them for autograph cookbooks: quantities by the quart, no timings, no yield. The technique holds up, but the chestnuts need more attention than the note gives them.
- Score the chestnuts firstThe recipe assumes the shells will split on their own. Cut an X through the shell on the flat side of each nut before boiling, or a few will burst in the pot and the rest will be harder to open.
- Peel them hotBoth the outer shell and the bitter inner pellicle come away cleanly only while the nut is steaming. Lift a few at a time from the water and leave the rest simmering; once they cool the skin welds itself to the flesh.
- What a quart weighsA quart of Brussels sprouts is roughly 1 lb. A quart of chestnuts in the shell is somewhere around 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb, which should yield about 2 cups or so peeled -- a generous match for the sprouts, and you can reasonably use less.
- "Boiled until tender"The recipe gives no time. Small sprouts need 5 to 7 minutes in salted water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance at the core. Past that they turn grey and sulphurous.
- Chestnut timingChestnuts want 20 to 30 minutes at a simmer depending on size, and they should be cooked through and mealy rather than crisp. They are done separately from the sprouts and combined only at the end, as written.
- The butterNo quantity is given. Four tablespoons melted over the combined vegetables is about right for this volume; brown it lightly if you want the dish to taste like more than it is. Season at the table -- the chestnuts, boiled in the shell, will have taken up little salt.
- PaprikaAt this period paprika in an American kitchen would most often have been a sweet Hungarian type, used as much for colour as flavour. Sprinkle it over the buttered vegetables at the end rather than into the hot butter, where it scorches and turns bitter.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. It is best assembled and eaten immediately; reheated, the chestnuts go pasty.
Brussels sprouts with chestnuts is a northern European pairing -- both are cold-weather crops that come in together, and the combination turns up on English and French winter tables. Guerite says she found the dish in Italy; whether or not the pairing originated there, Italy is certainly chestnut country, the nut having been a staple food across the Apennines long before it became a holiday garnish. The recipe is typical of the celebrity cookbooks of the period, in which stage and vaudeville performers were solicited for a dish and a signature. The contributions were often short, sometimes barely instructions at all, and part of their value to the publisher lay in the autograph facsimile printed beneath -- here rendered, by the typesetter or the scanner, as "Luly very Tuly yours."