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Brussels Sprouts with Cheese
I box Brussels sprouts 1/2 pint (I cup) rich cream 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful grated Parmesan cheese Trim the sprouts and boil them in boiling salted water till they are perfectly tender, drain thoroughly, and let get quite cold.
Mix the cream and salt together, then dip each sprout into it; arrange them in a buttered shallow earthenware dish, sprinkle the cheese over them, and bake in a hot oven for six minutes.
Serve hot.
A simple gratin that depends on two things the original states almost in passing: the sprouts must be cold and thoroughly dry before they meet the cream, and the oven must be genuinely hot for so short a bake.
- "I box" of sproutsSprouts were commonly sold loose by the box or quart measure, so a quart, very roughly a pound, is a fair reading; that serves about four as a side. Buy them on the stalk if you can and pull them off yourself.
- Half a pint of creamOne US cup, as the recipe itself notes. "Rich cream" means heavy cream, around 36 percent fat; anything lighter will slacken and pool under the sprouts rather than clinging.
- A hot oven425-450F. Six minutes is only enough to melt and colour the cheese, so the oven must be fully preheated and the dish placed near the top. A minute or two under the broiler at the end gives a better crust.
- Boiling "till perfectly tender"Period recipes generally cooked sprouts further than we would now. Eight to ten minutes in well-salted boiling water is plenty for medium sprouts; test with a knife tip at the stem end. Overcooked sprouts release the sulphur compounds that gave the vegetable its reputation.
- Cold and dry mattersThe instruction to let them get quite cold is the hinge. Warm, steaming sprouts thin the cream and it slides off. Drain, spread on a towel, and cool completely, then dip. Refreshing them in ice water after boiling holds the colour as well.
- The dishA shallow earthenware dish here means just that: a gratin dish or small baking dish. Choose one wide enough to hold the sprouts in a single layer so every one gets cheese.
- ParmesanHalf a cup grated from a block of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana. Pre-grated tubbed cheese contains anti-caking starch and browns poorly in six minutes.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt in a cup of cream is assertive, and the cheese adds more. Taste the cream before dipping and scale back if your Parmesan is sharp. A grating of nutmeg or black pepper is in keeping.
Marion Harris Neil's casserole book belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century cookery writing built around a single piece of equipment, in this case the earthenware or fireproof dish that could go from oven to table and save a household one course of washing up. Brussels sprouts had been grown around Brussels since at least the eighteenth century and were well established in British and American markets by 1900, so a treatment with cream and Parmesan reads as a deliberate bit of continental polish. The technique itself is the classic gratin: a cooked vegetable, a fat, a cheese, and a short blast of heat to brown the top. Parmesan appears often in books of this period as the grating cheese of choice, and it kept well before home refrigeration and could be bought as a hard, long-lived wedge.