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Purée de Choux de Bruxelles
Ingredients.
One pound of Brussels Sprouts.
One quart of boiling White Stock.
One gill of thick Cream.
A quarter of an ounce of Cornflour.
Boil the Brussels sprouts until tender, with the lid off and a small piece of soda in the water, drain them, and pass through a sieve. Then put this into a pan with the stock and the cornflour (blended in a little stock), stir till it boils. Add the cream and seasoning, and get it quite hot, but care must be taken that it does not boil, or the colour will be spoilt. Serve with fried bread.
A straightforward Edwardian purée soup, thickened lightly with cornflour and finished with cream. The whole recipe turns on the last instruction: once the cream is in, the soup must not boil.
- The hinge: no boiling after the creamReheat to just below a simmer. The recipe's own reason is colour: boiling dulls the green towards olive-grey.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 imperial fl oz, about 140–150 ml. "Thick cream" here means double cream, around 48% fat; heavy cream is the closest widely available match.
- CornflourCornflour is cornstarch. A quarter of an ounce is about 7 g, roughly two to two and a half level teaspoons — enough to give body to a quart of soup without turning it gluey. Slake it in cool or barely warm stock, not hot.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and unreduced. A light chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily browned, which will muddy both flavour and colour.
- The piece of sodaBicarbonate of soda holds the chlorophyll green, which is why cooks used it. It also softens the sprouts to mush and destroys most of the vitamin C, and too much leaves a soapy taste. If you use it at all, use a pinch for a large pan; the soup is perfectly good without it.
- Lid offThe usual period rationale: cooking uncovered lets volatile acids and sulphur compounds escape as steam rather than condensing back into the water, which was held to protect colour and keep the flavour milder.
- Passing through a sieveA blender or food mill does the bulk of the work in seconds, but still pass the purée through a fine sieve afterwards — sprout skins and stem fibre will not break down and give a gritty texture.
- Yield and servingA quart of stock plus a pound of sprouts gives four generous or six small servings. "Fried bread" of this period usually means croûtons or sippets, fried in butter or clarified butter.
Purées like this one belong to the long middle stretch of a formal Edwardian dinner menu, where a clear soup and a thick soup were customarily offered together and the guest chose one. The pattern is French in origin — a vegetable cooked, sieved, bound with a little starch and let down with white stock, then enriched with cream at the end — and it seems to have functioned as a template that could be applied to almost any vegetable in season, with the name simply changing to match. Brussels sprouts themselves take their name from cultivation around Brussels, where they are generally traced to the sixteenth century or earlier, and they reached British kitchen gardens as a late-autumn and winter crop, which is where a soup like this would have sat in the year. The pinch of soda in the cooking water is very much of its time: colour mattered enormously on a formal table, and cooks were taught tricks to protect it that later nutritional science made unfashionable.