The French Connection

I planted out some Brussel Sprouts the other day, bought from the garden centre. One type was Brolin which I put in last year and were excellent, and another type, which caught my eye because it was an earlier maturing variety, called Breton.

As you may have seen from my previous blogs, I’m always on the look out for those little curiosities that can turn up whilst digging. Occasionally I have dug up things that look like coins but disappointingly never are, sometimes it’s a stone and other times it’s been a button. Well this time, whilst dibbling a hole for a sprout plant, the real thing turned up.

Here’s a shot of it still in the soil.(Click photo to enlarge)

This is it cleaned.
After a bit of research it turns out to be a 17th century French coin, issued during the reign of Louis the 14th. You can just make out the denomination, a Liard de France. Unfortunately, you can’t see the date, but by style it falls somewhere between 1650 and 1700.

Now back to the connection bit. It happened to be one of the Breton variety that I was planting at the time. OK, I know that’s a bit tenuous to say the least, and I could well have been planting out French Beans or sowing early Nantes carrots I suppose, however there’s more.

It seems that old Louis was more than just interested in gardens and loved his vegetables. So much so that he had The Potager du Roi (fr: Kitchen Garden of the King) created near the palace of Versaille, to supply the King's court. A massive enterprise covering 25 acres, “it required thirty experienced gardeners to tend to the garden plots, greenhouses, and the twelve thousand trees”(full Wikipedia article here), to supply the King’s court.

The Potager du Roi.
Now that's what you call an allotment.

Lucifer's Crucifera

I know it’s a bit sad, but I’m that pleased with my Brussels Sprouts, that I just had to commemorate them in a blog. As you can see from the photos, it was a good yield of tight button heads.

There were just over six pounds in that picture, from the last six plants that I’ve just stripped, as I didn’t want to risk losing them to this unrelenting weather. After a couple of hours they were prepared and ready for the freezer.

Sprouts, to me, are a much maligned vegetable that when cooked properly are absolutely delicious.
Notice I say cooked “properly”, because at the risk of suffering the wrath of the ”al dente“ police, that means until they are good and soft !

Admittedly they are not to everyone’s taste, some even calling them the Devil’s vegetable. In fact one Captain Wayne Keble OBE, commander of HMS Bulwark banned them from his ship, "to protect his men from the evils of sprouts"(See article). I wonder if that’s why they put a cross on the bottom of them ?

I don’t think they do that much for global warming either, being associated as they are with high levels of methane production in some people.

Trouble is, the freezer’s now full of ‘em and there’s only so many boiled ones you can eat in a year, so we are going to have to get a bit more adventurous.

Stir fried ? Roasted ? Sprout bubble and squeak ? Hmmm, sounds good in principle but I think I’ll have to reserve judgement just for now.

Come to think of it, should we really be messing about with Lucifer’s Crucifera at all !!!