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Broccoli
Pick off the leaves and cut the stalks close to the bottom of the bunch; throw into cold water half an hour, then tie in a piece of cheese-cloth to prevent breaking; put into a kettle of salted, boiling water and boil twenty minutes. Take out carefully, loosen the cheese-cloth, place the broccoli head up in a hot dish. Pour around it a half pint of Cream Sauce and serve very hot.
1 quart of sprouts, 2 ounces of butter,
A straightforward boiled-and-sauced vegetable from the era when green vegetables were cooked until they surrendered. One timing needs changing; the rest of the method still works.
- The twenty minutesTwenty minutes in boiling water turns broccoli olive-drab and slack. Trimmed spears need 4-6 minutes, a whole head 7-9, until a knife meets slight resistance at the stalk. This is the single change worth making.
- Half pint of cream sauceAn American half pint is one cup, which is a sensible amount for a quart of broccoli. Make a thin béchamel from 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or cream, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- A quart of sprouts"Sprouts" here means the sprouting heads of broccoli, not Brussels sprouts. A quart measured loosely comes to something under a pound of trimmed florets and stalks, enough for about four as a side.
- The two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, and the original never says where they go. Either build the cream sauce on them or melt them over the drained broccoli before saucing; the recipe reads as an ingredient list broken off mid-sentence.
- The half-hour soakPeriod cookbooks commonly called for a soak, often in salted water, to drive insects out of the heads. Supermarket broccoli rarely needs it, and a long soak waterlogs the florets. A brief rinse, or ten minutes in salted water for garden broccoli, is enough.
- The cheeseclothWorth keeping if you are cooking a whole head and want it to arrive at the table intact. Tie it loosely so water circulates, and lift the bundle out by the knot rather than tipping the pot.
- Salted waterSeason the water assertively, about a tablespoon of salt per four quarts. Broccoli takes on very little salt in a few minutes and blandness is the usual fault of this dish.
- Serving hotThe instruction to use a hot dish is not decoration. Cream sauce skins and cools fast on cold china; warm the platter and the sauce boat.
Broccoli reached American tables well behind cauliflower and cabbage, and nineteenth-century cookbooks often treat it as cauliflower's poor relation, to be boiled the same way and hidden under the same white sauce. The vegetable is generally traced to southern Italy, where the sprouting form was long established; Thomas Jefferson is frequently cited as having sown broccoli at Monticello in the 1760s, but it remained a market rarity in the United States until Italian growers in California expanded production in the early twentieth century. The wording here, with its "quart of sprouts," reflects that older sense of broccoli as a loose bunch of flowering shoots rather than the dense single crown that dominates produce aisles now. The long boil and the blanket of cream sauce belong to a period when vegetables were rarely trusted to taste of themselves.