The Grinch has come early this year – the noble Brussels sprout is in danger
There are, as someone bleakly pointed out the other day, just 16 weeks until Christmas. I haven't 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.
This year the Grinch has come early, in the form of a plague of flea beetles : 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.
The outlook for the Christmas dinner-table is alarming: we can expect smaller, scarcer, more expensive sprouts. For some this isn't 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.
Some of this is a matter of cooking . Mrs Beeton offers a single recipe, with an instruction to "clean the sprouts of insects" and boil them for 9-12 minutes, until they are thoroughly subdued. If the cook "is very expeditious", they can be "arranged on the dish in the form of a pineapple" – an effect that Beeton calls "very pretty", 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.
Those stalwarts of mid-20th century cooking, Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, are more sympathetic to the beleaguered sprout. It has, they write, "come in for a great deal of criticism". They advise against cross-cutting the stem and offer several appetising recipes, including a purée that can become the basis for a soufflé or a soup, and the now classic combination of sprouts with chestnuts.
For a vegetable once considered so sturdily British ("Our friends from overseas have told us that… they will never be reconciled to Brussels sprouts", write Hume and Downes), it is the Larousse Gastronomique that shows the humble sprout the most love.
It describes a noble lineage – imported to Brussels from Italy by Roman legions – and suggests recipes including a gratin, an excellent soup (a staple of my post-Christmas lunches), an immensely avoidable sautée à l'indienne (anything à l'indienne in France is to be strenuously swerved) and the fantastically exotic sprout-and-salsify omelette.
This last involves cooking salsify (good luck finding it) in white wine, braising it and binding with a velouté sauce, bunging it in an omelette, surrounding it with noisette potatoes and sautéed Brussels sprouts, and pouring over some reduced demi-glace sauce. (Two different bone-based sauces: let's hope your freezer looks like an ossuary.)
It is not, probably, a recipe that many of us will be knocking up for a quick supper any time soon. But thanks to the flea beetle, the humble sprout may become sought after by Christmas. If so, sprout-and-salsify omelettes will certainly follow, and we can expect Brooklyn Beckham's version (brace yourselves) to appear in good time for the festive season.
Alongside the festive table overtaken by sprout influencers, perhaps the rest of us might gain a belated insight into the challenges that farmers face to get our dinner on the table, not just at Christmas, but all year round.
