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Brussels Sprouts Sauted with Cream
One pound of sprouts should be carefully pared, picked and blanched; drain and put into a sautepan and two tablespoonfuls of veloute sauce; season with a little salt, pepper and nutmeg, and add half a breakfast cupful of sweet cream. Heat well, but do not allow them to come to a boil for five to six minutes, tossing them frequently to prevent burning. Dress them on a hot dish, and serve.
A simple braise-in-cream finish that depends entirely on holding the pan below a boil. Two of the terms — velouté and "breakfast cupful" — need translating before you start.
- Lead with the heatThe instruction not to let the cream boil is the whole technique. At a bare simmer the cream and velouté tighten into a glaze; at a boil the cream breaks and the sprouts overcook into sulphurous mush. Keep it at a lazy shiver for the five or six minutes.
- Velouté sauceA white stock (chicken or veal) thickened with a blond roux; a large hotel kitchen of this kind would likely have had some standing. Two tablespoons is a thickener and seasoning, not a sauce course. Substitute a scant tablespoon of butter cooked with a teaspoon of flour and loosened with a few spoonfuls of chicken stock.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup ran larger than a teacup, roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces; half of one is about 1/2 cup. Err low — you can add more cream, but you cannot un-thin the pan.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from soured or cultured cream. Use heavy cream; light cream and half-and-half are far likelier to split.
- Pared and pickedTrim the stem flush, pull off the loose outer leaves, and cut a shallow cross in the base of larger sprouts so the core cooks at the same rate as the leaves.
- BlanchingSalted boiling water, 3 to 5 minutes depending on size, then drain thoroughly — a wet sprout will thin the cream. Stop while the sprouts still have bite, since they get another five or six minutes in the pan.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use a restrained pinch. It is there to lift the cream, and pre-ground nutmeg at any quantity will dominate the dish.
- YieldOne pound of sprouts serves three as a side dish, four if the rest of the menu is generous.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catalogues the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen built on French method, and this entry shows the machinery plainly: a vegetable is blanched, finished in a sautepan, and bound with a spoonful of velouté drawn from a sauce already standing on the stove. Brussels sprouts are generally traced to the region around Brussels, where they are recorded by the late eighteenth century, and a hotel book working in the French idiom treats them as an obvious side dish. The reliance on a mother sauce is the tell — a home cook would have thickened with butter and flour on the spot, but in a brigade kitchen the velouté was simply there, and a cook took two tablespoons of it the way one takes salt.