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Cauliflower,
Wash carefully, so as not to break off the sprouts; trim all the outside leaves and put into boiling water well salted; boil until tender, and then serve with a white sauce or with cream.
A four-line instruction that assumes you know what a white sauce is and how long a cauliflower takes. The main correction is time: the period standard of boiling until fully soft produces grey, sulphurous cauliflower.
- Boil brieflyA whole head of the size sold today needs roughly 15-20 minutes in fast-boiling water, florets about 5-8. Test the stem with a knife tip; it should give with slight resistance. Cauliflower held well past that point turns dull and develops its strong smell as the sulphur compounds break down.
- Salt the water properlyThe book says only "well salted" and gives no quantity. About a tablespoon of salt per quart is a workable proportion for boiling vegetables; the cauliflower absorbs very little of it.
- "Sprouts"The word here means the florets, or curds, of the head, not Brussels sprouts. The instruction is simply to keep the head intact while washing.
- The soak the book leaves outOlder cauliflower recipes frequently direct half an hour in cold salted water head-down before cooking, to draw out insects lodged in the curd. Supermarket heads rarely need it; a farm or garden head does.
- White sauceA basic bechamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until the raw flour taste is gone, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. "With cream" means exactly that, hot cream poured over, nothing thickened.
- Keeping it whiteCook uncovered, or vent the lid. A tightly covered pot traps acids released by the vegetable and turns the curd yellowish-grey. A squeeze of lemon in the water helps, though it slightly firms the texture.
- YieldOne medium head, roughly 1 1/2 lb trimmed, serves four as a side dish with about a cup of sauce.
Cauliflower reached English and American tables as a somewhat aristocratic vegetable, difficult to grow well and prone to bolting in heat, and nineteenth-century seedsmen advertised named varieties heavily. Boiling whole in salted water and masking in a white sauce is one of the commonest treatments in American and British cookbooks of the period, though the same books also give fried, scalloped and gratin versions. The sauce adds richness, which a cheese-topped version, cauliflower au gratin, would later supply more emphatically. The brevity of the entry is itself telling: in a general household book, cauliflower needed no explanation, only a reminder to keep the head whole and to salt the water.