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Brussels Sprouts with Chestnuts
Remove outer leaves, thoroughly wash and drain one and a half pints fresh Brussels sprouts, plunge in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt, boil for twenty minutes and drain on a sieve. Shell a half pound American chestnuts, plunge in boiling water for five minutes, drain and peel. Place in a saucepan with enough white broth to just cover, season with three saltspoons each salt and sugar, cover pan and let cook for twenty-five minutes. Drain, then place both chestnuts and sprouts in a sautoire with an ounce butter, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons of white pepper, toss well, cook for five minutes, dress on a hot vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward holiday side, but the measurements are by volume and by saltspoon, and the boiling time belongs to an era that liked its vegetables soft.
- A pint of sproutsA pint and a half of sprouts -- Sprouts are measured by volume here, not weight. A pint and a half of trimmed sprouts comes to somewhere between about 10 oz and 1 lb (roughly 300-450 g) depending on their size and how closely packed, enough for about four as a side.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons each of salt and sugar for the chestnuts is about 3/4 teaspoon each; the same measure of white pepper at the end is assertive by modern taste, and half of it is plenty.
- The boilTwenty minutes will collapse sprouts into grey mush and drive off the sulphur compounds as smell rather than flavour. Seven to ten minutes in well-salted water, until a knife meets slight resistance at the core, is the modern standard; halve large ones so they cook evenly.
- American chestnutsThe chestnut blight had all but erased the American chestnut from commerce within a generation of this book. What you will buy today is European or Asian, usually Italian.
- Peeling chestnutsScore an X through the shell on the flat side before the five-minute blanch, and peel while genuinely hot. Both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle must come away; once they cool, the pellicle welds itself to the nut. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts skip this stage entirely.
- White brothA pale unbrowned stock, veal or chicken, without tomato or dark roasted bones. Any light chicken stock stands in. Twenty-five minutes of gentle simmering suits raw chestnuts; pre-cooked ones need only five to ten minutes to take up the seasoning.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. What matters is surface area: everything should sit in one layer so the butter browns the sprouts rather than steaming them.
- YieldServes four generously alongside a roast.
The pairing of sprouts and chestnuts is a fixture of northern European winter cooking, where both are at their best after the first frosts, and it reached American tables largely through the French restaurant kitchens that shaped books like this one. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, wrote for a household aspiring to that style, which is why an ordinary vegetable dish is finished in a sautoire and the chestnuts are braised separately in white broth rather than simply boiled with the sprouts. The call for American chestnuts gives the page a rough terminus: the blight that would destroy the species as a commercial crop was first identified in New York in the early 1900s, and within a few decades the nuts on offer in American markets were imported. Brussels sprouts themselves are generally traced to the region around Brussels, where they are documented by the late eighteenth century, and they were still something of a specialty vegetable in the United States when this book appeared.