I needed assistance at Sainsbury’s self-checkout the other day: Where do I find ‘sprouts’ so that the machine knows how to price them?
Silly me – they’re under B is for Brussels, not S is for Sprouts.
Now I think about it, you hardly ever hear anybody call them Brussels these days; not in the old days, either.
Market traders & greengrocers often left out ‘sprouts’ & used the B-word as verbal or written shorthand, complete with the intrusive apostrophe which causes such pain to some.
We children used to struggle with getting our tongue round the double ‘s’ sounds in the middle of Brussels sprouts, Brussel sprouts came much more naturally. These days they are just sprouts.
Is there another, non-Brussels kind?
My handy Chambers bedside dictionary was not much help:
Sprout: A new growth; a young shoot; a side bud, as in Brussels sprouts (see under Brussels) … OE sprutan (found in compounds). Dutch spruiten. German spriessen.
Brussels sprout (also without cap.) a variety of the common cabbage with many heads, each like a miniature cabbage, an individual head from this.
Well there’s a fashion now for buying sprouts still on the stalk – truly a cabbage with many heads & inedible trunk. Perhaps only in this form should they properly be called Brussels sprouts.
Back on the computer with access to the historical quotations in the online OED, I find that, one way or another, sprouts have formed part of our diet for centuries. In fact, if you think about it, sprouts of all sorts of vegetation must have formed part of the diet since human time began, but coming closer to our own age we find Sprowts of nettles (1639) then tender roots of cabbages (1699), sort of young coleworts (1721), small shoots of old Cabbage, in Winter, when they begin to bloom & head (1726), & roots, especially of Swedish turnip, abundant through February & March (1842).
Sprouts of the kind we would recognise today put in their first appearance in the mid-C19th in a reference to ‘stems & remains of cabbages that have supplied you with sprouts’.
Still no clear reason for the association with Brussels however. A wider, but by no means exhaustive, search of the web fails to locate any authoritative explanation – one suggests that their spread in popularity around Europe came as a result of WWI. Flanders poppies, Brussels sprouts.
What a very funny set of associations in the English language with Brussels – sprouts, carpets, lace & Bendy Bananas
And then there is the problem of the Anglicisation of the name of the city which today causes us so much irritation & frustration with its daft laws.
A deft compromise between the Walloon & Flemish versions?
Perhaps the greengrocers’ apostrophe is a subtle indication that these are sprouts which belong to Brussel.
