Choux de Bruxelles au Beurre

Choux de Bruxelles au beurre (Brussels sprouts with butter) teaches the discipline of two-stage cookery. The water begins the cooking, but it must not finish it. Drain the sprouts while their centers still resist the knife, then let butter and enclosed oven heat carry them to tenderness without reducing them to little cabbages of surrender.

The original entry assumed a professional rhythm: a boiling pot ready, a sauté pan beside it, an oven free, and several hands moving vegetables through service. For one cook, one stove, one evening, a lidded ovenproof skillet does the same work. I have set the quantity at 1½ pounds for four people and kept the book's exact proportion of two ounces of butter per pound. The brigade's hand-offs are scaffolding and can go. The firm blanch, the hot drain, the full measure of butter, and the covered fifteen-minute finish are the dish itself and must stay.

Done properly, the choux arrive deep green, gently sweet, and gleaming, with butter caught between their leaves rather than floating uselessly beneath them. The one step that decides everything is the first cooking: take them from the water while the core is still distinctly firm.