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Brussels Sprouts and Cabbage
Remove outside leaves and soak in cold water for half an hour. Drain. Cook in boiling salted water until tender, changing the water at least once during cooking. Serve Brussels sprouts whole with butter and salt or with white sauce. Chop the cabbage when cooked, season with salt, pepper and butter, reheat and serve, or mix with one cup cabbage, with one cup white sauce, cover with buttered crumbs and bake until brown.
Two vegetables handled in one entry, on the assumption that both want long boiling in several changes of water. That assumption is the part to reconsider; everything else here still works.
- Ignore the change of waterDraining and refilling mid-cook was meant to carry off sulphur compounds, but it also carries off flavour and guarantees a grey, slack sprout. Boil once, in a generous quantity of well-salted water, and stop early instead.
- Real timingsSmall trimmed sprouts are done in roughly 6 to 10 minutes, halved ones in 4 to 5; a knife should meet slight resistance at the core. Wedges of cabbage need something like 8 to 12 minutes, shredded cabbage 3 to 4. The book's "until tender" over two waters is likely to land well past that.
- The cold-water soakHalf an hour in cold water was commonly recommended to purge insects from garden produce, and it does firm limp sprouts. With supermarket vegetables a rinse is generally enough, and long soaking of cut cabbage leaches it.
- Salted waterAbout 1 tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts. Drain thoroughly and let the vegetables steam dry in the hot pan for a moment before buttering, or the butter slides off into water.
- White sauceThe period standard is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it well; boiled cabbage gives the sauce nothing.
- The baked versionThe line "mix with one cup cabbage, with one cup white sauce" is garbled, but appears to mean equal parts cooked chopped cabbage and sauce, scaled up as needed. The book gives no temperature; around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes will brown the crumbs and set the edges bubbling.
- Buttered crumbsToss 1/2 cup dry breadcrumbs with 1 to 2 tablespoons melted butter until evenly coated. Unbuttered crumbs will not colour and go dusty.
- YieldA pound of sprouts or a small cabbage serves four as a side dish; the gratin from one cup cabbage and one cup sauce serves two.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, published its cook book as promotional matter, and the vegetable chapter is thoroughly of its moment: brassicas boiled hard, then either buttered or buried in white sauce and crumbs. The double water bath appears here on the theory that the strong smell of cooking cabbage was a fault to be washed away rather than a sign of overcooking. Brussels sprouts were still something of a novelty on ordinary tables at the time, which is likely why they are folded in with cabbage here rather than given an entry of their own; they are traditionally associated with the region around Brussels, though the dating of their cultivation varies widely. The gratin at the end, cabbage bound with white sauce under buttered crumbs, is the era's all-purpose treatment for any cooked vegetable that needed to look like a dish.