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Brussels Sprouts and Chestnut Salad
One pint of Brussels sprouts, one-half pint of chestnuts, mayonnaise dressing. Clean and cook the Brussels sprouts in boiling salted water one-half hour, or until tender, then drain and add to them the chestnuts, which have been shelled, blanched and boiled. Add mayonnaise dressing sufficient to moisten them. Serve in a salad bowl with the remainder of the dressing on top.
A late-Victorian composed salad of two winter vegetables, dressed while still warm enough to absorb the mayonnaise. Only the cooking time really needs revising.
- The half-hour boilThirty minutes in salted water turns sprouts grey, sulphurous and slack. Trim them, halve any that are large, and boil 6-8 minutes until a knife slips into the core with slight resistance, then drain well. Long boiling of green vegetables was standard in printed cookery of the period.
- Measuring by the pintVegetables were commonly measured by volume in American cookbooks of the period. A pint of trimmed sprouts is roughly 8-12 oz (225-340 g); a half-pint of shelled chestnuts is about 6 oz (170 g), which needs something like 8 oz of chestnuts in the shell.
- ChestnutsScore an X in the flat side, roast or boil 15 minutes, then peel while hot to get both the shell and the inner brown skin off. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are an honest substitute and need only a short simmer to soften. Break them into halves or thirds rather than chopping fine.
- Dress warm, serve coolFold the mayonnaise in while the vegetables are still warm but no longer steaming; the dressing clings and the chestnut flavour comes forward. Then chill briefly. Very hot vegetables can split a homemade mayonnaise.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes a made-from-scratch mayonnaise, thicker and sharper than jarred. If using commercial mayonnaise, loosen it with lemon juice and a spoonful of cider vinegar or the salad will read as heavy.
- Drain thoroughlySprouts hold water between their leaves. Spread them on a towel for a few minutes before dressing or the mayonnaise will thin into a puddle at the bottom of the bowl.
- YieldServes four as a side salad. Best eaten the day it is made.
Brussels sprouts and chestnuts have long travelled together in Northern European winter cookery, and by the turn of the twentieth century the pairing is often said to have appeared on American holiday tables, usually buttered rather than dressed. What is characteristic of this book is the impulse to take an established hot vegetable dish, cool it, coat it in mayonnaise and call it a salad. Around 1900 the American salad was expanding rapidly beyond greens to take in cooked vegetables, meat, fish, fruit and gelatine. Chestnuts were then an inexpensive autumn staple in the eastern United States, gathered as much as bought; the blight that destroyed the American chestnut was first identified in New York in 1904 and within a few decades had made the nut an imported one, which is why a recipe that treats a half-pint of them as unremarkable now reads a little differently.