Stephen Downes

When I was a kid, brussels sprouts were your worst vegetable nightmare. They were boiled to a glass-green miasma, which was soggy and bitter.
It was the great Australian culinary way in those days. I’m convinced it was even part of being a Methodist child to be forced to eat brussels sprouts. Penitential.
Then I got to France and they became a delicacy. Only one way of preparing them was legitimate. You cut crosses in the stem with a sharp knife and boiled them to something less than the classic ocker pulp; they retained vestiges of crunchiness depending on the age of the woman cooking them. Older women tended to simmer them longer.
But what happened next was mandatory. Everyone drained them well, squeezing them a little, before finishing off their preparation in a frying pan. Butter would bubble to clarity, batons of smoked bacon would be added and cooked to crispness. In the process, of course, the pig rendered its fat into the pan. The brussels sprouts would be tipped in and fried briefly with the bacon. Although sprouts were usually served with common roasts – beef and chicken – they suit the strongest of meats.
In Food, Waverley Root writes that sprouts were said to have been grown in what is now Belgium from the 13th century, which makes them a very old vegetable indeed. They conquered the rest of Europe later – much later in Britain, he says, which took to them only in the 19th century. More than 20 years old, my addition of Food declares that the Poms are the world’s biggest sprouts consumers. (Can you imagine how they cook them!)
They grow well in Melbourne. I’ve cultivated them a couple of times. It’s fairly miraculous that from a few plants you can repeatedly over weeks break off mature sprouts, only to have new ones replace them lower down the thick stem on which they cluster.
Root recommends no recipes, but Margaret Fulton fries them in butter, adding seasoning, lemon juice and parsley, or cooks them in cream with a little white pepper. She bakes them under breadcrumbs with onion and celery, or fries them with garlic and onion and garnishes them with croutons.
All these methods require you to boil your sprouts first for about seven minutes or less. I liked the idea of adding cream, and added some freshly grated nutmeg as well before browning off the top in a hot oven with some grated cheddar. A meal in itself, it would have been marvellous with guinea fowl.