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Brussels Sprouts in White Sauce
Pick over, remove wilted leaves, and soak in cold water fifteen minutes. Cook in boiling salted water twenty minutes, or until easily pierced with a skewer. Drain, and to each pint add one cup White Sauce I.
A short entry that assumes you already have the book's White Sauce I to hand. The one thing worth overruling is the cooking time.
- Twenty minutes is too longSprouts of the size sold today are usually tender in 6 to 9 minutes in boiling salted water, and go grey and slack if boiled much past 12. Larger, coarser market sprouts may be part of the reason for the longer time given here. Test with a skewer as directed, but start testing at six minutes.
- A pint of sproutsThis is a volume measure, not a weight: a pint of trimmed sprouts is roughly half a pound. One cup of sauce to that quantity is a fairly wet coating; use half to two-thirds if you want the sprouts to stay distinct.
- White Sauce IA butter-and-flour roux cooked with milk and seasoned with salt and pepper. Look up the book's own proportions rather than assuming a modern bechamel; the numbered white sauces differ mainly in the amount of thickening.
- The soakFifteen minutes in cold water was insurance against insects lodged between the leaves, and it also firms up limp sprouts. Bagged supermarket sprouts do not need it, though a soak does no harm. Some older cooks salted the water for this step; unsalted is fine.
- TrimmingTake off wilted outer leaves and pare the stem flush. Cutting a cross in the base, a common older instruction, is unnecessary at modern sizes and lets the sprout waterlog. Halving large ones cooks them more evenly than scoring.
- Drain hardWater clinging in the leaves will thin the sauce on the plate. Drain in a colander and let them steam dry for a minute before saucing.
- SeasoningA grating of nutmeg in the sauce and a good deal of black pepper are period-appropriate and keep the dish from tasting flat. Yield is four modest servings as a side.
Brussels sprouts reached English and American tables well after cabbage and cauliflower, and nineteenth-century cookbooks arguably treat them as something closer to a novelty vegetable of the better greengrocers; the name is generally traced to their cultivation around Brussels, where they were grown as a market crop by the eighteenth century. Their appearance here, dressed in one of the book's numbered white sauces, is characteristic of how the Boston Cooking School taught vegetables: boil, drain, and finish with a measured quantity of a standard sauce built earlier in the book. That cross-referencing may well have served as the school's pedagogical method as much as a space saver, since a cook who had mastered White Sauce I could apply it to sprouts, onions, celery or salt cod without learning a new recipe each time.