The Offal of the Vegetable World

The way marketing with food works is this: you either find some obscure, cheap and largely disliked and ignored food, discover it, dust it off, present it with truffles and start charging top dollar for it. Or, you claim some ordinary thing that people never really stopped eating is broadly disliked and is undergoing a revival. Which causes a revival. The beet comes to mind. Beets figure prominently in people’s grisly memories of childhood suffering, especially the canned or pickled variety. NPR just had a profile of the beet, the despised beet, and its John Travoltaish comeback. But as Travolta said, in the depth of his decline, ‘I never was as good as they said I was, and I never was as bad.’ But the beet has always been the glorious star of spring and the character actor of fall. And so too the Brussels sprout. Brussels sprouts and beets are the offal of the vegetable world. The pork belly of winter fare.
My first encounter with the tiny cabbage was an unhappy one. Not the cream sauced glop of fifties Thanksgivings, no, but a depressing boiled bit business down in Colonial Virginia. They tasted like burnt cabbage. It was not until I grew them, when I was 20, that I appreciated the flavor, which is, well, a little like burnt cabbage, but only in the best sense. Brussels sprouts have real flavor, much more so than cabbage, or even kale or collard greens. They are not going to be a foil for some sautéed garlic, they will stand up to the toasted hazelnuts and nutmeg. And they don’t require a smothering of cheese or a blanket of cream sauce.
My winter CSA included two stalks of Brussels sprouts. The two pounds of kale went in the fridge, but the Brussels sprouts I took apart and cooked that night. They don’t look like much, but two stalks are enough to feed 4 or 5 people, at least, if some of them resist the idea that a vegetable can be the main event on the plate. Meaning children. They can be a lot of work if you have to trim them, especially when they are infested with a flea-sized bug and the flea-sized bug’s excrement. These were not. I removed each one from the stalk with a paring knife and then sliced them in half, except for the tiny ones which I left whole. The rest was simple. Heat some olive oil over a medium flame and add a teaspoon of mustard seeds and a teaspoon of cumin seeds. When the seeds began to pop (be careful not to burn them; if you do, start over), add two tablespoons of chopped garlic, stir for a couple of minutes until golden, raise the heat and add the Brussels sprouts. Toss them until coated, add a good pinch of salt and a few grinds of pepper and 1/3 cup of water, cover, and cook until tender. The water should evaporate. Add two tablespoons of red wine vinegar and toss again and then serve. I served them with filet of Pollack baked in tomatoes sauce with olives and capers and linguine. Those recipes are for another day! Brussels sprouts can be prepared in many ways, taking off from this recipe. With a neutral oil you can use panch pora, the Indian mixture of five seeds (cumin, black cumin, fenugreek, mustard and fennel), onions, ginger and garlic, turmeric, hot pepper and finish with grated coconut. Or what have you. In the height of summer a Brussels sprout might be a mean thing, like an intestine or pig snout, but in January? The heat of the sun, stored for months in the creamy yellow heart of the sprout bursts out to make glorious summer.