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Vegetables: Boiled
Boil rapidly for fifteen minutes.
When done, turn into a colander and pour cold water over them. They are ready now to serve with any kind of sauce, or can be seasoned with butter salt, and pepper.
Brussels Sprouts Sautéd. 1 quart Brussels sprouts, 3 tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful salt, + teaspoonful pepper.
VEGETABLES add the flour and stir until smooth, then add the minced spinach and salt and pepper. Cook five minutes; then add cream, and cook three minutes longer.
Spinach with Egg.
Blanch the sprouts and drain well.
Put them in a saucepan with butter and other seasonings. Place over a hot fire and shake frequently. Cook five minutes; serve hot.
What survives here is a pair of Brussels sprouts methods -- boiled and drained, then a quick sauté of blanched sprouts in butter -- alongside fragments of a creamed spinach. The sprouts instructions are complete enough to cook from.
- QuantitiesA quart of Brussels sprouts is roughly a pound, about 4 cups of trimmed sprouts, and would serve about four. Three tablespoons of butter for that quantity is generous by modern standards.
- The salt and pepper amountsThe seasoning line has lost its fractions and reads only as "teaspoonful salt" and "teaspoonful pepper." Season to taste rather than guessing: about half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper suits a pound of sprouts.
- Fifteen minutes is too longFifteen minutes is long -- The surviving boiling instruction does not name its vegetable, though its position on the page suggests sprouts. Fifteen minutes of rapid boiling is far longer than modern practice, which is nearer 5 to 7 minutes in well-salted water for small sprouts, until a knife meets slight resistance at the core.
- Why the cold waterPouring cold water over the drained sprouts halts the cooking and helps hold the colour. It is a refreshing or shocking step rather than blanching in the modern sense, since these sprouts have already been boiled through; the sauté recipe separately directs that its sprouts be blanched.
- Dry them before sautéingSprouts that go into the pan wet will steam rather than colour. Drain thoroughly and pat dry, then keep the pan genuinely hot and shake often, as directed; five minutes over a hot fire may give some browning.
- Halve themRecipes of this kind generally assumed small, tight sprouts cooked whole. Sprouts sold today are often larger; halving anything much bigger than a walnut helps the centres cook in step with the outsides.
- The spinach fragmentThe surviving spinach lines call for flour stirred smooth (a butter roux is implied but not stated in what survives), then minced spinach with salt and pepper, five minutes' cooking, then cream and three minutes more; the heading printed here is "Spinach with Egg." Spinach cooks down enormously -- reckon roughly a pound of raw leaves for two servings.
Brussels sprouts reached English and American tables well before they became a fixture of them. The book prints two treatments: the older habit of long boiling, and a blanch-and-sauté method, in which the vegetable is only partly cooked in water and finished in fat. The instruction to shock the drained vegetable in cold water shows the period had grasped the principle, even if the fifteen-minute boil undid the benefit.