My Sunday Column grew out of a post on this blog about a superlative brussels sprouts dish I tried in a Los Angeles restaurant.
Here’s my theory of brussels sprouts: People eat them on Thanksgiving as a kind of Puritan penance. At least, that’s what I think happened in our house.
Preparing the brussels sprouts required the kind of coordinated joint effort usually reserved for a pig killing. My father and all the able-bodied men performed the annual chestnut-peeling ordeal — an event that involved much swearing, arguing over technique and finger pricking until a scant handful of crumbly bits was produced.
Meanwhile, my mother would trim and carefully mark each brussels sprout heel with a talismanic X so they would “cook properly.” This meant boiling them for the entire duration of the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade until they resembled not vegetables so much as eyeballs wrenched from the sockets of decomposing zombies.
The chestnut bits and slimy green scleras were then mixed in a …