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Brussels Sprouts
Carefully remove all stale outer leaves from 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 a small frying pan with half ounce good butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; gently toss them while cooking for two minutes and use as required.
A plain boil-and-butter treatment, typical of the professional kitchens this book drew on, where vegetables were cooked ahead and finished to order. The one thing worth changing is the boiling time.
- Twenty minutes is far too longSprouts held at a boil for twenty minutes turn grey-green, collapse and release the sulphur compounds that give them their bad reputation. Five to eight minutes for small sprouts, up to ten for large ones, until a knife tip meets slight resistance at the core.
- A quart of sproutsSprouts were sold and measured by volume; a quart is roughly a pound, or 450 g, which serves three to four as a side. Buy them loose rather than on the stalk if you want them of even size, since mixed sizes cook unevenly.
- Use more water, not a quartA quart of water will stall the moment the sprouts go in, and they will steam sullenly rather than boil. Use three or four quarts at a hard rolling boil so the temperature recovers at once.
- Saltspoons and ouncesA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them are half a teaspoon of white pepper — assertive but correct for the period. Half an ounce of butter is one tablespoon.
- Trim, don't hollow outTake off only the loose or yellowed outer leaves and shave the dry stem end. Cutting a deep cross in the base, once standard advice, mainly speeds up the waterlogging of the centre.
- Refresh if you are holding themThe recipe ends with "use as required", so the sprouts may not be going straight to the table. If you are not finishing them immediately, drop the drained sprouts into ice water, then drain again and dry; the butter-toss in the pan reheats them in two or three minutes.
- White pepper is deliberateWhite pepper was the usual choice for pale or green dishes so that no black flecks show. Black pepper tastes fine here but changes the look.
Brussels sprouts are a cabbage cultivated for its axillary buds, and the name reflects a genuine association with the region around Brussels, where they are generally traced to market gardens in the low countries by the eighteenth century. In English-language cookbooks they remained a slightly foreign vegetable well into the nineteenth century. The method here — boil in salted water, drain, then finish in butter in a pan — is a common treatment for green vegetables of the era.