Saturday, January 31, 2015

Kitchen Intuition: Fall in love with Brussels sprouts


There is a simple path to loving Brussels sprouts: Don’t. ever. boil. them. Never, ever, ever.
Those were the Brussels sprouts I grew up on, and they were an atrocity. My siblings and I were tortured with them on a regular basis every winter. They were smushy and stinky and bitter. But after I discovered how incredibly yummy Brussels sprouts can be, I wanted to find out why they used to be so awful. So I went digging around in some of my vintage cookbooks to see what advice they were offering the women in my mother’s and grandmother’s generations.
I checked in more than a dozen cookbooks, ranging in date of publication from 1887 to the 1980s, with classic titles that included "Fannie Farmer," "Joy of Cooking," "Betty Crocker" and "Good Housekeeping." And not a single cookbook contained a recipe for Brussels sprouts that didn’t involve boiling them.

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