Brussel sprouts are a cultivar of one plant—brassica oleracea. Cultivars come from years of farmers and geneticists marrying different plants together to come up with a version everyone loves. Think Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt. From brassica oleracea we have broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, and cabbage and Brussel sprouts.
My husband’s grandmother took a stalk of Brussel sprouts to a pot of green dye to make a vegetable Christmas tree for the holiday feast. Although the Brussel sprouts were green to begin with, the green dye turned them instead to blue. Blue foods are a rarity in the human food world—like Angelina Jolie’s lips. Don’t eat them, blue screams. No one in the very large family of thirty-six, including grandkids, did.
I slice the Brussel sprouts’ root ends off, then turn them to slice them like the tiny cabbages they are. I use my right hand to push the butts toward the end of the cutting board, my pinkie finger driving. I am fast so I’m the one that cuts the sprouts. I am the cook so I’m the one that is in charge of the amount of butter. I really don’t like cutting Brussel sprouts—in fact, cutting all the cultivars of brassica oleracea brings their own challenges—big plugs of broccoli, cabbage that won’t divide naturally into strips—chopping them is as bad as spelling them. How many cc’s in broccoli? Do I really have to capitalize the Brussel part of the sprouts?
My husband Erik says it’s my fault that I end up cooking all the time. I don’t like how other people cut the broccoli or salt the onions. I don’t know if that’s it—I’ve eaten plenty of other cooks’ food before but when I’m in the kitchen I do look overly closely at the way the knife saws instead of slides, the way the butts of the sprouts don’t get pushed over to the edges of the cutting boards. No one uses enough butter and no one pays attention to the vegetarian who wouldn’t eat bacon with her cauliflower. People keep leaving the ribs of the kale on the stem. You can’t eat kale ribs, I want to yell. But instead, I just pick up the knife and slice the leaf from the ribs myself.
I don’t cook Brussel sprouts only for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes you are trapped alone with your kids and your husband who always like Brussel sprouts. You don’t need to pour maple syrup on them or add bacon. They’ll eat them plain with butter on top of a pile of farro and you think you’ve done the world a service—bearing these Brussel eating children, avoiding meat, eating Brussel sprouts in the middle of summer even though everyone knows Brassica oleraceas are to be eaten late fall, early winter.
Sometimes families fall apart. It’s not always the Brussel sprouts’ fault. One kid loves cauliflower. Another loves kale. That third baby that no one knew about might have loved broccoli but you will never know whether or not just as you will never know how many cc’s there are in broccoli. You can’t pick your family, they say, even if you give birth to it. It’s amazing how much free will we pretend to have. Did brassica oleracea choose to become cabbage? Does anyone choose to eat the mother plant, common mustard, in its original form?
Cauliflower rice and cauliflower crust. Cauliflower pancakes. Substitute cauliflower for anything gluten and white. Cauliflower mom and cauliflower grandparents. You can sculpt cauliflower back the shape of a head, this time, one with eyes. Although it seems there is no end to human manipulations, no one asks the Brussel sprouts to be greener but in the 90’s, scientists did make the Brussel sprout less bitter. Perhaps Erik’s grandmother’s blue dye wasn’t the culprit. Perhaps it was the inherent flavor rather than the external modifications that made all thirty-six members of Erik’s family avoid popping one tree-bite into their mouths.
How do you recover your reputation? George H.W. Bush apparently didn’t like broccoli but broccoli consumption soared regardless. HW was a single term president. Rolling Stone, in an article wondering why Brad Pitt is always eating in his films, notes that perhaps “we just like to watch hot people do stuff.” Brad Pitt eating kale in the early two-thousands could explain a few things. As we get older, fewer people watch us do stuff with pleasure. I’ve noticed I have less and less of an audience I have as I slice the Brussel sprouts for Thanksgiving and for Christmas.
No one demanded the Brussel sprouts to be so organizedly cut. That was my own edict. The Brussel sprout probably preferred being bitter—better to keep the rabbits from chomping off his head. Is a Brussel sprout merely a magnified floret of broccoli? I can picture the ladder of Brussel sprouts growing high in a field and little voles climbing to the top and chowing their way down. Brussel sprouts lose their repulsions while aging mothers lose their attractions.
I can’t pick my family but maybe I can persuade them to come back, even stay awhile. With enough butter, the people will come. Brussels may never be my macaroni and cheese but they can be my partner in butter. I will ensure the little butt ends never get tossed into the sauté pan. Precision itself is a kind of beauty. Plus, I like to think I have gifts beyond butter. Come see what I can do with kohlrabi. We can turn the lights off. I promise not to feed you anything bitter or anything blue. Listen for the sound of my lips. Pretend I am Brad Pitt. In the dark, multiple permutations are possible but the core DNA remains the same. With enough butter and enough hybridization, I may become even more delicious, more beautiful, even younger, as a cultivar, than you.
NICOLE WALKER is the author of Processed Meat: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster, The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet and Sustainability: A Love Story and A Survival Guide for Life in the Ruins. Her previous books include Where the Tiny Things Are, Egg, Micrograms, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, and This Noisy Egg. Her work has been published in Orion, Boston Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Normal School and other places. She curated, with Rebecca Campbell, 7 Artists, 7 Rings—an Artist’s Game of Telephone for the Huffington Post. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and is noted in multiple editions of Best American Essays. She’s nonfiction editor at Diagram and Professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.
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