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Cauliflower Snow
2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cauliflowers 4 poached eggs Salt and paprika to taste Toasted bread Boil cauliflowers in salted water till tender, then drain and set near fire till quite dry. Remove all green parts and press flower through a potato ricer upon a hot dish, on which they are to be served. In no way crush the mass as it falls from the ricer. Sprinkle over with melted Crisco. Surround dish with poached eggs, each laid upon square of toasted butered bread. Dust each egg with salt and a little paprika. Serve very hot.
A simple supper dish whose whole effect depends on texture: riced cauliflower heaped up loose so it looks like drifted snow. Everything else is timing.
- The hinge: do not pack the riced massThe cauliflower is pressed through a potato ricer directly onto the hot serving dish and left exactly as it falls. Smoothing, spreading or spooning it collapses the strands into puree and you lose the entire point of the dish.
- Dry the cauliflower properly"Set near fire till quite dry" means driving off surface water so the riced curd stays fluffy rather than weeping. A few minutes in a low oven, or back in the dry hot pan off the heat, does the same job.
- Don't overboilThe recipe only says boil "till tender." Break the heads into large pieces and simmer 8 to 10 minutes, until a knife goes through the stem with slight resistance; waterlogged cauliflower will not rice cleanly.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Melted butter is better here, and a good olive oil works; use about 2 tablespoons either way.
- Two cauliflowersTwo medium modern heads (about 2 lb of trimmed florets) is generous for four servings, one per poached egg. A single large head will do for two or three.
- PaprikaRead this as a mild sweet paprika, used as much for colour against the white as for flavour. Smoked paprika changes the dish considerably.
- Assembly orderPoach the eggs and toast the bread first, keep them warm, and rice the cauliflower last. Riced vegetable cools very fast on the plate, which is why the recipe insists on a hot dish and "serve very hot."
A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, and nearly every recipe in it calls for a spoonful or two of the product whether or not the dish needs fat at all — as here, where two tablespoons are simply melted and sprinkled over. The dish itself belongs to an older European habit of forcing cooked vegetables through a sieve or ricer to make them look like something else: chestnut and potato "vermicelli", riced potato "snow", and this cauliflower version, all named for the appearance rather than the ingredient. Cauliflower was still a slightly genteel vegetable in American cookbooks of the period, frequently served whole under a white sauce, and the ricer treatment plus a ring of poached eggs on toast turns it into a light luncheon or supper course of the kind that filled the middle of a long Edwardian menu.