Brussels Sprouts
To be boiled like cabbages in abundance of water and a little salt for fifteen minutes, to be drained and dried, to be tossed in butter, with pepper and nutmeg. For garnish a little butter will do. For an entremet use more butter, and it may be also a veal gravy or white cullis. There is a superfluity which was once in favour-buttered toast beneath the sprouts when served as an entremet, or else sippets of toast around them.
A short Victorian formula that assumes you already know how to finish a vegetable in butter. The only figure in it — fifteen minutes — is the one thing to ignore.
- The timingFifteen minutes suits large, mature sprouts, but it produces grey, sulphurous mush from anything sold today. Small trimmed sprouts want 4-6 minutes in fast-boiling salted water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance at the core.
- Abundance of waterThe instruction is sound and worth keeping: a large volume suffers less of a temperature drop when the sprouts go in, and dilutes the sulphur compounds released as they cook. The recipe asks only for 'a little salt'.
- Drained and driedThis is the hinge. Sprouts hold water in their leaf layers, and butter will not coat a wet vegetable — it slides off and pools. Drain them thoroughly, then let them steam dry in the hot empty pan for a moment before the butter goes in.
- EntremetAn entremet was a dish served as a course in its own right rather than alongside a roast. That is why the butter is increased and a sauce is offered: as a garnish the sprouts are an accessory, as an entremet they are the point.
- White cullisCullis (from the French coulis) means a strained, thickened stock — here a pale one, roughly what a modern kitchen would make as a light velouté from veal or chicken stock with a white roux. Any well-reduced light stock, thickened or not, will serve the same purpose.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted or fried bread, set around the dish. The buttered toast underneath is doing what a slice of bread does under game — absorbing the butter and sauce so none is wasted.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little; pre-ground nutmeg is flat and the quantity here is meant to be barely detectable, a background sweetness against the brassica bitterness.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Reckon about 1 lb of sprouts for four people as a side, and 1½ to 2 oz of butter for that amount if serving them as a dish in their own right.
Brussels sprouts take their name from the region where they were selected and grown intensively — cultivation around Brussels is generally traced to the late medieval or early modern Low Countries — and they reached English tables in quantity only in the nineteenth century. Kettner's manner here describes a dish in terms of how grandly it is to be presented rather than by weight and measure, and cannot resist a note of fashion criticism. The buttered toast dismissed as "a superfluity which was once in favour" belongs to an older English habit of setting vegetables and small birds alike on a sop of bread, a practice already looking rustic to a restaurant palate by the time this was written.