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Boiled Brussels Sprouts
Wash well in salted water about two pounds of Brussels sprouts and pick them over well. Place on the fire in a saucepan filled with water a little salt and bicarbonate of soda; leave off the lid and boil fast till quite tender, say about twenty to twenty-five minutes. When done drain them and dry on a cloth, and put in a large sautepan a good-sized lump of butter and a little salt and pepper, and toss the sprouts in this until they become quite hot again, but do not fry them. They may be served on a quartered round of buttered toast or separately, as desired.
Brussels Sprouts, Maitre d'Hotel Boil the sprouts to be used and then place them in a large saucepan with a lump of butter and heat them well. Put a half pound of fresh butter in a pan with two tablespoonfuls of chopped parsley, the juice of a couple of lemons, a little salt and white pepper, and mix together well with a spatula, and when it boils stir quickly. Place the sprouts on a dish and turn the sauce over them.
Two pounds of sprouts, boiled hard and finished in butter, with a lemon-parsley variation appended. The method is sound apart from two Victorian habits that need dropping.
- Skip the bicarbonate of sodaSoda was added to keep green vegetables bright, but it breaks down cell walls and destroys vitamin C, leaving sprouts grey-green and slimy at the stem. Plain well-salted water gives better colour and far better texture.
- Twenty-five minutes is far too longTrimmed sprouts of ordinary size are tender in 6 to 9 minutes in fast-boiling salted water; halved ones in 4 or 5. Test with a knife tip at the base rather than by the clock. The long boil may reflect older, larger, tougher market sprouts.
- Lid off is deliberateLid off -- Leaving the pan uncovered is usually said to let sulphur compounds escape rather than condense back into the water, which keeps the smell and flavour milder. Worth keeping, whatever the original reason for it.
- Picking over and washing"Pick them over" means trimming the stem and removing loose or yellowed outer leaves; scoring a shallow cross in the base of large ones is a later refinement, not something the recipe asks for. A salted soak was commonly used to draw out insects as well as to season.
- Drying on a clothDo it. Any surface water will thin the butter and steam the sprouts rather than glazing them. A clean towel or a few minutes in the drained colander is enough.
- "Do not fry them"The hinge of the first recipe. The sautepan is only for reheating and coating in butter; take them off once they are hot and glossy. Modern taste often prefers the opposite, browning halved sprouts hard, but that is a different dish.
- Halve the maitre d'hotel butterCut back the maitre d'hotel butter -- A half pound of butter with the juice of two lemons is a restaurant batch meant for a service, not for one dish. For two pounds of sprouts, 4 tablespoons of butter -- a quarter of the original -- with one lemon and the parsley is ample.
- Do not really boil the sauceButter, lemon juice and parsley worked with a spatula is a compound butter; brought to a hard boil it splits into oil and watery whey. Melt gently and swirl, or soften the butter, beat in the lemon and parsley cold, and let it melt over the hot sprouts.
- YieldTwo pounds serves six as a side dish, or four generously. The quartered round of buttered toast is a period plating convention and can be left out without loss.
Brussels sprouts reached fashionable American tables comparatively late; they are generally traced to the Low Countries, where compact sprouting cabbages were being grown around Brussels by the eighteenth century, and they arrived in English and then American kitchen gardens in the nineteenth. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 from the Waldorf's kitchens, treats them as a European vegetable worth two entries, the plain boil and the maitre d'hotel finish, which was the standard hotel dressing of the period: butter, chopped parsley and lemon juice, applied to everything from grilled fish to boiled potatoes. The bicarbonate of soda is the real period marker. Nineteenth-century cookery held that a pinch of soda in the pot preserved the colour of green vegetables, and the advice survived in print for decades after what it does to texture was well understood.