{"id":36282,"date":"2026-09-05T02:11:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T02:11:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/36282\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T02:11:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T02:11:02","slug":"the-grinch-has-come-early-this-year-the-noble-brussels-sprout-is-in-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/36282\/","title":{"rendered":"The Grinch has come early this year \u2013 the noble Brussels sprout is in danger"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are, as someone bleakly pointed out the other day, just 16 weeks until Christmas. I haven\u2019t yet come to terms with the end of summer, but 16 weeks still seems time enough to plan festivities whose twinkling perfection will inevitably be tarnished by some unforeseen event.<\/p>\n

This year the Grinch has come early, in the form of a plague of flea beetles<\/a>: tiny creatures with a festive metallic appearance. What flea beetles like best are brassicas and hot weather, so for them this summer has been an all-you-can-eat buffet of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts.<\/p>\n

The outlook for the Christmas dinner-table<\/a> is alarming: we can expect smaller, scarcer, more expensive sprouts. For some this isn\u2019t terrible news: humans evolved to equate bitterness with toxicity, and while selective breeding has mitigated the bitter overtones of sprouts, there are still plenty of people who recoil from their appearance on a dinner plate.<\/p>\n

Some of this is a matter of cooking<\/a>. Mrs Beeton offers a single recipe, with an instruction to \u201cclean the sprouts of insects\u201d and boil them for 9-12 minutes, until they are thoroughly subdued. If the cook \u201cis very expeditious\u201d, they can be \u201carranged on the dish in the form of a pineapple\u201d \u2013 an effect that Beeton calls \u201cvery pretty\u201d, but strikes me as quite creepy, like one of the medieval culinary jokes in which four-and-twenty blackbirds are baked in a pie, emerging to astonish the diners when the crust is cut.<\/p>\n

Those stalwarts of mid-20th century cooking, Constance Spry<\/a> and Rosemary Hume, are more sympathetic to the beleaguered sprout. It has, they write, \u201ccome in for a great deal of criticism\u201d. They advise against cross-cutting the stem and offer several appetising recipes, including a pur\u00e9e that can become the basis for a souffl\u00e9 or a soup, and the now classic combination of sprouts with chestnuts.<\/p>\n

For a vegetable once considered so sturdily British (\u201cOur friends from overseas have told us that\u2026 they will never be reconciled to Brussels sprouts\u201d, write Hume and Downes), it is the Larousse Gastronomique that shows the humble sprout the most love.<\/p>\n

It describes a noble lineage \u2013 imported to Brussels from Italy by Roman legions \u2013 and suggests recipes including a gratin, an excellent soup (a staple of my post-Christmas lunches), an immensely avoidable saut\u00e9e \u00e0 l\u2019indienne (anything \u00e0 l\u2019indienne in France is to be strenuously swerved) and the fantastically exotic sprout-and-salsify omelette.<\/p>\n

This last involves cooking salsify (good luck finding it) in white wine, braising it and binding with a velout\u00e9 sauce, bunging it in an omelette, surrounding it with noisette potatoes and saut\u00e9ed Brussels sprouts, and pouring over some reduced demi-glace sauce. (Two different bone-based sauces: let\u2019s hope your freezer looks like an ossuary.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are, as someone bleakly pointed out the other day, just 16 weeks until Christmas. I haven\u2019t yet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36283,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5],"tags":[312,19568,18,263,19566,19567,5276,144,3577],"class_list":["post-36282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-agriculture","tag-british-recipes","tag-brussels","tag-christmas","tag-comment","tag-fruit-and-vegetables","tag-history","tag-news","tag-opinion"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/117216010983501338","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}