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Brussels Sprouts
Brussels sprouts are simply a superior variety of cabbage. They are usually eaten boiled and eaten with a cream sauce. Pick them over carefully, throw them into a pot containing an abundance of boiling water; let them boil twelve minutes; drain them and throw them into cold water. When they are chilled, drain them again and warm them up in a cream sauce prepared for a quart of sprouts by melting a tablespoonful of butter with a tablespoonful of flour and adding a pint of cream (or milk will do) slowly, with salt and pepper. Let the sprouts simmer slowly for seven minutes in this sauce. If you prefer, the sprouts may be cooked the same length of time in two tablespoonfuls of butter. Toss the sprouts often to prevent their catching at the bottom of the pan, and serve them hot. The process of cooling these vegetables in cold water is a necessary and important one. This blanching improves all members of the cabbage family. It takes away the strong sour flavor and renders the vegetable delicate and wholesome. It is especially desirable to blanch cabbage before cooking it.
A straightforward blanch-and-sauce method that still works, with two points where modern practice differs: the boiling time and the thickness of the sauce.
- The hinge: shock them coldThe instruction to drop the drained sprouts into cold water is the whole point of the method. It stops the cooking dead, fixes the green, and prevents the sulphurous flavour that develops as brassicas sit hot in their own steam. Drain them well before they go into the sauce or the cream will thin out.
- Twelve minutes is longFor modern sprouts, halved or left whole, five to eight minutes in hard-boiling water is enough; they should give to a knife tip at the core but not collapse. They then get seven more minutes in the sauce.
- A quart of sproutsMeasured by volume, as vegetables usually were. A quart of trimmed sprouts is roughly a pound, or 450 g, which serves four as a side dish.
- Salt the waterThe recipe seasons only the sauce. An abundance of boiling water, generously salted, cooks brassicas faster and more evenly than a crowded pan, which is what the original is getting at.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a pint of cream gives a pouring sauce, not a coating one. If you want it to cling, double both to two tablespoons each. Cook the flour in the butter a minute or two before the liquid goes in.
- Milk in place of creamThe substitution the author allows still holds, but whole milk only; skimmed milk makes a thin, chalky sauce. Nutmeg is a common modern addition if you want it.
- The butter-only variationTwo tablespoons of butter for a quart of sprouts is a light gloss rather than a glaze. Keep the pan moving as instructed, and finish with a squeeze of lemon or a grind of pepper, since there is no sauce carrying seasoning.
Brussels sprouts are indeed a cabbage, Brassica oleracea, bred for the small heads that form along the stalk rather than one large head at the top; the name is generally traced to market gardens around Brussels, where the plant is recorded as being grown by the eighteenth century. The insistence on blanching reflects a period preoccupation with making cabbage "delicate and wholesome" — some nineteenth-century household writers treated the cabbage smell as close to a sanitary problem, and the cold-water shock was a common remedy. The reasoning was pre-scientific but the technique was sound, and professional kitchens still blanch and refresh green vegetables the same way.