Home › Vegetables › Brussels Sprouts
Brussels Sprouts
Pick off the dead leaves from the sprouts, soak the sprouts in cold salted water for one-half hour, wash them and put them on the fire in plenty of boiling water. Boil in an uncovered saucepan until tender. Just before they are done, salt the water. Drain in a colander. Reheat with melted butter or butter substitute, season with salt and pepper, and serve very hot. They may be served with cream sauce.
A plain boiled-sprout method from the era before anyone worried about overcooking them. The technique is sound; the timing is the part to watch.
- Cook them brieflySprouts are tender in 6-8 minutes for small ones, up to 10 for large, in a wide pan of hard-boiling water. The older habit of boiling until thoroughly soft is what gave them their sulphurous reputation: the longer they cook, the more of their glucosinolates break down into hydrogen sulphide.
- Why the lid stays offAn uncovered pan lets those volatile sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back into the water. It is one of the few pieces of period vegetable lore worth keeping.
- The cold salted soakThis was a precaution against insects hiding between the leaves, common with field-grown sprouts sold on the stalk. With supermarket sprouts a rinse is enough; halve or score the base of very large ones so the core cooks at the same rate as the leaves.
- Salting at the endThe instruction to salt just before they are done follows a period habit of holding salt back until vegetables are nearly cooked. Salting the water from the start seasons them better and does no harm.
- Butter substituteAt the time this meant oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening, often used for reasons of cost. Butter, olive oil or a neutral oil all work.
- Drain well before dressingSprouts hold water in their leaf layers. Let them sit in the colander a minute and shake them before the butter goes on, or the sauce slides off.
- Cream sauceThe period cream sauce is a thin white sauce: roughly 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to 1 cup of milk, cooked out and seasoned. Allow about 1 cup of sauce per pound of sprouts.
- YieldA pound of sprouts serves four as a side dish.
Brussels sprouts take their name from the region around the Belgian capital, where they are generally traced to market gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the sprout as a distinct cultivated form of Brassica oleracea is documented with confidence only from the later eighteenth. They reached American kitchen gardens and markets in the nineteenth century and were still comparatively unfamiliar when this book appeared: cookbooks of the period often file them with cauliflower and cabbage and give them a similarly long boil. The offer of "butter or butter substitute" in New Delineator Recipes is a mark of its moment, when margarine had established itself in American households and a magazine cookbook could be expected to acknowledge both the household that bought butter and the one that did not.