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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-and-buttered treatment that still works, provided the boiling is kept short. The period habit of cooking sprouts until thoroughly soft is where most of the trouble lies.
- Boil briefly"Until tender" in books of this period generally meant a much longer boil than we would give sprouts now, which turns them grey and sulphurous. Halved sprouts need about five minutes in fast-boiling water, whole ones seven to eight; they should keep a slight bite at the core.
- Uncovered, and whyThe instruction to leave the pan uncovered is sound and worth following. Sulphur compounds released by brassicas concentrate under a lid and both the colour and the smell suffer.
- The cold salted soakThe half-hour soak was for driving out insects from garden-grown sprouts. Supermarket sprouts do not need it, and a long soak waterlogs them. A quick rinse is enough.
- Salting the waterThe recipe holds the salt back until the sprouts are nearly done; it gives no reason. Salting the water generously from the start is the usual modern practice, seasons the sprouts from within, and does the texture no harm.
- Butter substituteIn a book of this date this means margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter gives a far better result here, though a good olive oil is a reasonable modern swap.
- DrainingShake the colander well and let them steam dry for a moment before adding fat. Wet sprouts will not take a glaze and dilute whatever sauce follows.
- Cream sauceThe suggested sauce is a standard white sauce made with milk or cream: roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of liquid, cooked out and seasoned with salt, pepper and a scrape of nutmeg.
- QuantityThe recipe gives none. Allow about 1 lb of trimmed sprouts for four as a side dish.
Brussels sprouts are generally traced to the Low Countries, where they are often said to have been grown in quantity around Brussels by the eighteenth century, and they reached English and American kitchens as a late-autumn and winter vegetable that improves after frost. Their appearance in a Butterick volume — a pattern company's household compendium aimed at middle-class American housewives — reflects how far the vegetable had travelled by the 1910s, from a market-garden curiosity to something a general recipe book could assume its readers would recognise. The mention of "butter substitute" dates the page usefully: margarine and compound vegetable fats were both cheaper than butter and, during the war years, may at times have been hard to do without, and cookbooks of the period seem to have offered them in the same breath as the real thing.