Home › Vegetables › Scalloped Brussels Sprouts
Scalloped Brussels Sprouts
Pick over, remove wilted leaves, and soak in cold water one quart sprouts. Cook in boiling salted water until soft, then drain. Wash celery and cut in pieces; there should be one and one-half cups. Melt three tablespoons butter, add celery, cook two minutes, add three tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one and one-half cups scalded milk; add sprouts and turn mixture into a baking-dish. Cover with buttered crumbs and bake in a hot oven until crumbs are brown.
A straightforward gratin: sprouts blanched, bound in a celery-flecked white sauce, crumbed and browned. The only real risk is overcooking the sprouts before they ever reach the oven.
- Cook the sprouts short"Until soft" was written for a generation that boiled cabbage into submission. Six to eight minutes in well-salted boiling water, until a knife slips into the base with slight resistance, is enough — they get further heat in the oven. Drain thoroughly and, ideally, spread them out to dry so the sauce is not watered down.
- QuantitiesOne quart of sprouts is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb, or about 20-24 medium sprouts. With the celery and sauce it wants a 1 1/2- to 2-quart baking dish, and serves four to six as a side.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. At that heat the crumbs should brown in about 12 to 15 minutes, which is also long enough for the sauce to bubble at the edges. A cooler oven leaves you waiting, and the sprouts suffer.
- The sauceThree tablespoons butter, three tablespoons flour and 1 1/2 cups milk is a medium white sauce — thick enough to coat, not to set. Cook the flour in the butter and celery a minute before adding milk, and add the milk gradually while whisking. Season with salt and pepper; the original assumes you know to.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, when a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. It is often explained as a precaution with raw milk, and it still helps the sauce come together smoothly, but cold milk whisked in gradually works fine.
- The celeryCut it fine — 1/4-inch slices — since two minutes in butter will not soften larger pieces, and the original never cooks it further before baking. Some crunch is the point, but raw batons in a gratin are not.
- Buttered crumbsFresh or dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a cup of crumbs to two tablespoons butter. Panko browns well and stays crisp longer. A handful of grated Parmesan in the crumbs is not in the original but is not out of keeping.
The treatment here is late-Victorian domestic science — a vegetable boiled, bound in white sauce, crumbed and browned. The white sauce, with its measured tablespoons of butter and flour, was a backbone of the Boston Cooking School method, a ratio taught once and then applied to fish, chicken, oysters and vegetables alike. The cabbage-family sprout is generally traced to the region around Brussels, where it was being grown by the eighteenth century, though it entered English and American kitchens later than the plant itself was known. Celery was still something of a prestige vegetable in the late nineteenth century, often served raw in special glass dishes, which gives the dish a slightly dressed-up character.