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Brussels Sprouts

A boiled Brussels sprouts dish seasoned with butter, salt, pepper, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Brussels Sprouts

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Brussels Sprouts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rinse the Brussels sprouts in cold water.

  2. Remove the outer leaves, trim, and soak the sprouts in cold water with salt for about one hour.

Boil

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of salt and the baking soda to boiling water.

  2. Add the sprouts to the boiling water and boil rapidly without a cover until the stems are soft, about 10 minutes.

  3. Strain the sprouts through a colander.

Dress and serve

  1. Melt the butter in the saucepan.

  2. Add the sprouts to the melted butter and season with pepper and salt. Shake the mixture well together.

  3. Dish the sprouts in a hot vegetable dish and serve immediately.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Brussels sprouts + peppertop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Brussels sprouts + buttertop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Brussels sprouts
Form the main body of the dish, cooking down to a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the sprouts and carrying flavour.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's alkalinity, helping the sprouts soften faster and stay green.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly without a cover. Rapid boiling with the lid off lets volatile acids escape, which helps keep the sprouts green. Overcooking makes them soft and sulfurous, so check the stems for tenderness at about 10 minutes.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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