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Cauliflower À La Béchamel
Select a firm, white cauliflower, remove leaves and cut off the stalk. Soak (head down) in cold salt water to cover. Drain and cook (head up) in boiling salted water to cover until tender but not broken apart. Drain well and dispose on shallow serving dish. Pour over one and one-half cups Béchamel Sauce (see Page 85). Sprinkle with finely chopped parsley.
A whole boiled cauliflower under white sauce, from a period when the head was served intact and carved at the table. Almost everything hinges on not overcooking it.
- The hinge: stop early(see verdict above)
- The salt-water soakPeriod cookbooks commonly direct a head-down soak in cold salt water to draw out insects and grit from between the curds; this one gives no time. Modern cauliflower rarely needs it, but 20 minutes or so in cold salted water does no harm and helps a very tight head cook evenly.
- Cooking wholeCut a deep cross into the trimmed stalk so the core cooks at the same rate as the florets. If you would rather not gamble on a whole head, break it into large florets and boil 6-8 minutes; the presentation suffers but the texture is more reliable.
- DrainingWater trapped between the curds will thin the sauce on the platter. Lift the head out with a skimmer, invert it on a folded towel for a minute, then turn it upright on the warmed dish.
- What Béchamel meant hereIn American cookbooks of this period Béchamel is usually a white sauce built on veal or chicken stock as well as milk or cream, richer and more savoury than a plain milk sauce. A modern all-milk béchamel works, but consider replacing a third of the milk with light stock, and season it assertively; there is nothing else on the plate.
- Quantity of sauceOne and a half cups is enough to coat a head of about 2 lb and pool slightly. A large head will want closer to two cups. Keep the sauce loose enough to flow, roughly the consistency of heavy cream, since it will thicken as it hits the cooling vegetable.
- YieldA medium head serves four as a side dish, or two as a light supper course.
Béchamel is generally traced to the French court kitchens of the seventeenth century and named for Louis de Béchameil, a household official under Louis XIV, though the attribution is traditional and the sauce almost certainly predates him. By the time this book was published the name had settled into American domestic cookery as shorthand for a refined white sauce, often one enriched with stock, distinguished from the everyday flour-and-milk "cream sauce." Serving a whole cauliflower masked in white sauce was a familiar way of dressing a plain vegetable, and the chopped parsley over the top is doing what a garnish was expected to do: break up an expanse of white.