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Brussels Sprouts
1 tablespoonful of salt, 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, A dash of pepper.
Wash the sprouts and take off the dead leaves, throw them into boiling water, add the salt and boil with the saucepan uncovered twenty minutes. Then drain into a colander; turn them into a heated dish. Melt the butter, add the flour, mix; add a pint of water in which the sprouts were boiled, stir until boiling, add the pepper, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, pour over the sprouts and serve.
Sprouts may also be served boiled with plain melted butter, salt and pepper, or boiled with Cream Sauce.
A plain boil finished with a quick sauce built from the cooking water — essentially a velouté made with vegetable stock. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so a little reconstruction is needed before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe header lists salt, flour and pepper, but the method also calls for butter, lemon juice and the sprouts themselves. Reckon on 2 tablespoons butter to the 2 tablespoons flour, and 1.5 to 2 lb of sprouts to serve four to six.
- Twenty minutes is far too longModern sprouts are picked small and tender and are done in 5 to 8 minutes in boiling salted water, or until a knife slips into the stem end with slight resistance. Twenty minutes suits larger, coarser sprouts and will reduce today's to mush.
- Why the pan stays uncoveredBoiling brassicas uncovered is said to let the volatile compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water. Whatever the mechanism, it is the recipe's own instruction and is worth keeping even with the shorter time.
- The sauce is the pointA pint of the cooking water into a 2-tablespoon roux gives a thin, light sauce rather than a gravy. Cook the flour and butter together for a minute before the liquid goes in, then simmer a few minutes so the sauce loses its raw-flour taste.
- Salt the water, not the sauceA full tablespoon of salt goes into the boiling water, and that same water becomes the sauce. Taste before adding any more salt at the end.
- Lemon lastThe tablespoon of lemon juice goes in off the heat or at the very end. Held at a simmer it dulls, and acid in the pot with the sprouts themselves will turn them drab olive.
- Trimming"Take off the dead leaves" is all that is needed — resist cutting a cross in the base, which only makes the outside overcook before the core is done.
- The variationsThe closing line offers melted butter or cream sauce instead. In books of this period cream sauce generally means the same roux made up with milk in place of the cooking water.
Brussels sprouts are a cultivated form of Brassica oleracea, the same species as cabbage and kale, and are generally traced to the region around Brussels, where they are recorded in cultivation by the eighteenth century. They reached English and American kitchens as a late-autumn and winter vegetable, arriving on the market after the first frosts, which is why they turn up in cookery books among the cold-weather greens. The treatment here — boil hard, then bind the cooking liquor with a butter-and-flour roux — is a common nineteenth-century approach to boiled vegetables, and puts to use liquid that would otherwise be thrown away.