Before cooking Brussels sprouts, some people in Western countries make a cross-shaped cut. They believe that the vegetable is boiled faster this way, but there is actually an origin of this habit.

In medieval Great Britain, people thought that there were tiny demons hiding in sprouts. If a person ate one of them, he or she would get food poisoning. This is similar to bacteria, right? We are not sure if they washed their vegetables, but this was the medieval way of “exorcizing” the sprouts.