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Salad of Brussels Sprouts and Beets
Soak the sprouts in salted water; then drain and cook in salted boiling water about fifteen minutes, or until tender; drain and cool. Dress with French dressing and pile in a mound. Finish the top with a fanciful-shaped figure cut from a slice of pickled beet, and place a wreath of cooked beet, chopped and seasoned with French dressing, about the whole.
A cold composed salad from the era when a vegetable dish was judged as much on its architecture as its flavor. Nothing here is difficult; the only real question is how long the sprouts spend in the water.
- Cut the cooking timeFifteen minutes in boiling water leaves sprouts gray and sulfurous by modern taste. Trimmed sprouts of average size need 5 to 7 minutes for tender-crisp; halve any that are large so they cook evenly.
- The soakAn initial soak in salted water was the usual period method for driving out insects hiding between the leaves, though the recipe does not say so. With commercially grown sprouts it is unnecessary, though a brief rinse and trim of the stem end still helps.
- Cool them fastDraining and letting them cool on their own continues the cooking and dulls the color. Drop them into ice water for a minute, then drain thoroughly and pat dry, or the dressing will slide off.
- French dressingAt this date the name meant a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, whisked or shaken to combine; period proportions vary, commonly somewhere between two and three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweetened orange bottled product that later took the name.
- Pickled beetThe decorative figure comes from a slice of beet pickled in spiced vinegar. Jarred pickled beets work; slice them about a quarter inch thick so the cut shape holds its edges.
- Dress warm, serve coldThe recipe dresses the sprouts after cooling, but many cooks find vegetables take up vinaigrette more readily while still slightly warm. If you dress them then, chill and toss again lightly before mounding.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities; about a pound of sprouts with one or two beets will serve roughly four as a side salad.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the turn-of-the-century boom in cold, composed salads, when a course of dressed vegetables was a mark of a fashionable table rather than an afterthought. The presentation instructions here matter as much as the cooking: a mound, a cut figure on top, a ring of chopped beet around the base. That vocabulary of "fanciful shapes" and wreaths comes straight out of the Boston Cooking School tradition Hill worked in, where salads were routinely built in molds, on rings of lettuce, or in scooped tomato and pepper cases. Brussels sprouts themselves were still something of a specialty vegetable in American markets at the time, generally traced to the region around Brussels and grown commercially in the United States only in limited quantities, which may help explain why they turn up in a book of dainties rather than in the plain-vegetable chapter of a general cookbook.