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Some Kitchen Kinks: Brussels
Brussels Sprouts. This is a species of cabbage, which forms in many small heads about the size of an English walnut on the stock of the plant. It is fairly common in most large markets and is worthy of more extended use than it has commonly met with in the United States.
Brussels Sprouts Blanched.-Remove the wilted or yellow leaves from the little heads or "sprouts," cut the stock close to the head, and soak in salted cold water for an hour or more.
Drain well and put into plenty of boiling salted water. Allow one teaspoonful of salt to two quarts of water. Boil rapidly for fifteen or twenty minutes, the time depending on the size of the heads.
When done turn into a colander and pour cold water over the heads. They are now ready to cook in butter, or to serve with any kind of sauce. Or the boiling water may be drained from the sprouts, which can then be seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper.
Brussels Sprouts Saute. 1 quart Brussels sprouts. 3 tablespoonfuls butter. 1/2 teaspoonful salt. 1/4 teaspoonful pepper.
To sauter a food is to cook it quickly in a frying pan in a little fat. Blanch the sprouts and drain well. Put them into a broad-bottomed saucepan with the butter and other seasonings. Place over a hot fire and shake frequently. Cook five minutes. Serve hot.
Kale, or Borecole. There are several varieties of this vegetable. The dwarf, green-curled kale is the best for the table and is a fall and spring vegetable. The leaves are sweeter and more tender after having been touched by the frost. In the North the roots may be banked with earth at the beginning of winter and when extreme cold weather sets in the plants may be covered lightly with hay or straw. In the spring the old stalks will produce young shoots that make delicious greens.
Two workable methods, but the boiling time belongs to an era when vegetables were cooked into submission. Read the blanching step as a guideline and trust your fork instead.
- Cut the boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes in rapidly boiling water leaves sprouts grey, sulphurous and slack. Trimmed sprouts of ordinary supermarket size are done in 5 to 8 minutes, when a knife tip meets slight resistance at the core.
- The cold water is not optionalPouring cold water over the drained sprouts stops the cooking and fixes the colour, which matters more here than in most vegetables because the compounds that turn cabbage rank build up quickly with extra heat. If they are going into the sauté pan, cool them, drain hard, and dry them on a towel so the butter browns rather than steams.
- Salt ratioOne teaspoon to two quarts is light by current practice; a tablespoon per two quarts seasons the sprouts from the inside and does no harm, since the water is discarded.
- The hour-long soakSalted cold-water soaks of this kind were generally aimed at insects hiding between the leaves, a real concern with field-cut sprouts sold loose. Trimmed sprouts on a stalk or in a bag need a rinse, not a soak, and long soaking waterlogs them.
- "Quart of Brussels sprouts"Vegetables were sold and measured by volume. A quart of sprouts is roughly a pound, which serves four as a side dish.
- "Sauter" and the broad-bottomed saucepanThe point of the wide pan is surface contact: the sprouts should sit in one layer so the butter can colour them. Halve larger sprouts cut side down and leave them still for a minute before you start shaking, and the five minutes given is about right.
- TrimmingCut the stem flush as directed but do not cut deeply into the base, or the outer leaves fall away in the water. The old habit of scoring a cross in the stem is usually explained as a way to help heat reach the core of sprouts boiled far longer than yours will be.
- The kale paragraphIt gives no method at all, only garden advice. The observation that frost sweetens kale is sound: cold weather converts starch to sugar in the leaves.
Brussels sprouts are a cultivated form of Brassica oleracea, the same species as cabbage, kale and cauliflower, and the sprout is simply an axillary bud swollen into a miniature head. The name points to the Low Countries, where the plant is generally traced to market gardens around Brussels; it is documented in Belgian cultivation by the eighteenth century, and older claims of a thirteenth-century origin are traditional rather than proven. The writer's complaint that the vegetable is "worthy of more extended use than it has commonly met with in the United States" was fair enough: American commercial growing was still small, and the crop only became widely available after cool coastal California acreage was developed in the twentieth century. Kale gets its alternative name borecole from the Dutch boerenkool, peasants' cabbage, and the banking-with-earth advice here belongs to a household that expected to take greens from its own garden rather than a market in February.