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Brussels Sprouts with Crisco
½ cupful Crisco 2 baskets brussels sprouts ½ cupful grated cheese Trim sprouts and cook them in boiling salted water till tender, drain and dry on clean cloth. Heat Crisco hot, then add sprouts, and fry until very hot. Turn them into hot vegetable dish, sprinkle cheese over them and serve immediately.
Sufficient for one dish.
A two-stage vegetable dish: boil, dry, then fry hard in fat and finish with cheese. The one thing that makes or breaks it is the drying step — wet sprouts will steam and spit rather than brown.
- Dry them properlyAfter draining, spread the sprouts on a cloth or towel and let the surface moisture go entirely. Any water left on them will drop the fat temperature and prevent the browned, blistered edges that are the point of the dish.
- "Two baskets""2 baskets" -- basket sizes were not standardised, but a market basket of sprouts was often around a quart, which would put this somewhere near 1 to 1½ lb in total. Buy about 2 lb and trim down.
- Crisco quantity1½ cups is a shallow-frying depth, not a coating. In a wide skillet 3 to 4 tablespoons will brown the sprouts perfectly well; the large amount here reflects a book written to sell shortening.
- Substituting the fatAny neutral high-smoke-point fat works — vegetable oil, ghee, or bacon drippings if you want more flavour. Modern Crisco is reformulated and no longer the partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil of the original.
- Boiling timeSprouts want roughly 5 to 8 minutes in salted water, until a knife just enters the base. Recipes of this period often directed considerably longer boiling for green vegetables; overcooked sprouts collapse in the pan and turn sulphurous.
- The cheeseThe book does not specify which cheese; a dry hard cheese such as Parmesan or a well-aged Cheddar suits the dish. Sprinkle it over the hot sprouts off the heat, as directed, so it softens rather than seizing into strings.
- Yield"Sufficient for one dish" appears to mean one serving bowl for a family table, probably four to six side portions.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce American cooks to a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens — a solid white shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, launched in 1911. The recipes in it are conventional dishes of the day rewritten so that Crisco stands in for butter, lard or suet, which is why a simple fried vegetable opens with a cup and a half of shortening. Boiling the sprouts and then finishing them in hot fat with cheese is a straightforwardly European treatment.