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Cream Cauliflower
Boil in salted water only-enough to cook it; then add a cup of cream and season with pepper and salt.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know how to handle a cauliflower. The hinge is the water: cook the head in barely enough salted water that what remains becomes the base of the sauce, so nothing is poured away.
- "Only enough to cook it"This is the whole method. Use about an inch of salted water in a lidded pan rather than a deep boil, so the small amount left when the cauliflower is tender combines with the cream instead of diluting it. If liquid remains after the cream goes in, reduce it uncovered for a few minutes.
- Cut it upThe recipe does not say whether the head is left whole or divided. A whole head takes appreciably longer to boil and the outside can collapse before the stem is done; florets of even size cook in 6-8 minutes and are ready when a knife meets slight resistance.
- Salt levelThe cooking water is also the sauce, so salt it as you would a soup rather than as you would pasta water. Heavily salted blanching water would carry straight through to the finished dish.
- CreamA cup of cream in this period was generally thinner than modern heavy whipping cream, nearer to half-and-half or single cream. Heavy cream works and gives a thicker coating; scale back to about two-thirds of a cup if you use it.
- Do not boil hard after the creamBring it only to a bare simmer. A rolling boil can make the cream separate into grains and fat.
- PepperWhite pepper is often used in pale dishes and avoids black flecks. Nutmeg appears with creamed cauliflower in some period recipes, though this version omits it.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish.
Cauliflower reached English and American tables as a fashionable garden vegetable long before it was an everyday one, and by the late nineteenth century seedsmen were selling reliable varieties that made it a fixture of the summer and autumn kitchen garden. "Creamed" vegetables of this sort fill pages of American household cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s, usually in one of two forms: the vegetable folded into a flour-thickened white sauce, or, as here, simply finished in cream with no roux at all. The unthickened version is often said to be the older and plainer of the two, and it survives in this book as a reminder of a time when cream might be used as a sauce in its own right. The brevity of the entry is characteristic of the period's cookbooks, which assumed a cook who needed the proportions rather than the procedure.