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Brussels Sprouts with Brown Butter
Carefully remove all outer stale leaves of a quart fresh Brussels sprouts, wash in two different changes of water, then plunge into a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt and boil for twenty minutes. Drain on a sieve and place in saucepan with a small piece of butter, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, gently toss, then dress on a vegetable dish. Place an ounce butter in a black frying pan, shuffle pan on fire until butter attains a nice brown colour, then pour it over sprouts and serve.
A straightforward Escoffier-era vegetable dish: boiled sprouts finished with browned butter. Two things need adjusting — the boiling time and the pepper.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes in salted water leaves sprouts grey, sulphurous and collapsing. Trimmed sprouts of average size need 5 to 8 minutes in rapidly boiling water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance at the core. Halve any that are much larger than a walnut so they cook evenly.
- A quart of sproutsMeasured by volume, that is roughly 1 pound, or about 4 cups of trimmed sprouts — enough for three or four people as a side.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them means a half teaspoon of ground black pepper. That is assertive for a pound of sprouts; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern taste, with more at the table.
- "Stale leaves"Filippini means the loose, yellowing outer leaves. Pull them off, trim the stem flush, and skip the two changes of wash water unless the sprouts came off the stalk with soil in them.
- The brown butter is the pointAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Melt it over medium heat and keep the pan moving until the milk solids turn hazelnut brown and the smell turns nutty — roughly 2 to 3 minutes. Pull it off the heat the moment the colour is right, since it goes from brown to burnt in seconds.
- "A black frying pan"Period shorthand for heavy cast iron or black steel. Any pan will brown butter, but a light-coloured pan makes it far easier to judge the colour; a dark pan hides it, so go by smell and by the flecks on a spoon.
- Dry them firstDrain the sprouts well and let the steam escape before tossing them with the seasoning butter. Wet sprouts will spit when the hot brown butter hits them and dilute its flavour.
Brussels sprouts take their name from the region around Brussels, where they are generally traced to market gardens of the eighteenth century, though sprouting cabbages of some form were grown in the Low Countries earlier. This recipe comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906); Filippini had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the method here follows French professional practice of the period — boil in salted water, drain, dress with butter, then finish at the last moment with beurre noisette, butter cooked until its milk solids brown and smell of hazelnuts. The long boiling reflects a generation that wanted vegetables thoroughly soft; the browned butter, by contrast, is a technique that has not needed revising at all.