The keepers of the sprout

16 December 2006

Whole families would live off the produce of a single field, prodding farmers to try to maximise revenues, Weckx explained. They first began planting cabbages under fruit trees; then — in a horticultural version of Manhattan — they went high-rise, realising they could grow more cabbages if they specialised in vertical plants that bore many tiny heads of cabbage on long stalks: in other words, sprouts. Weckx chose his words with care. ‘Saint-Gilles did not invent the Brussels sprout. There is a wild Brussels sprout, though it is a lot smaller. But Saint-Gilles can legitimately boast that it pioneered commercial sprout cultivation.’

True natives do not actually talk about Brussels sprouts. In Brussels, reasonably enough, they are just sprouts, or ‘sprôtches’ in the city’s dialect. Weckx believes that the English term ‘Brussels sprout’ entered common usage thanks to the Battle of Waterloo — one of the first moments when large numbers of Englishmen were wandering around what would later become Belgium. Can it be coincidence, Weckx asks, that during the fateful battle Saint-Gilles was not just full of ‘sprôtches’, it was also the site of British camps, including a military hospital more or less where the Eurostar train pulls in today?

Alas, Jane McCauley, a senior etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, has her doubts about the Waterloo theory. ‘It doesn’t really hold water from a dates point of view. We have a reference from 1796, from Richard Weston’s The Gardener’s and Planter’s Calendar. There is a line in that which says that in June you should “sew and prick out at the end of this month Brussels sprouts”,’ she says.