Home › Vegetables › Curried Cauliflower
Curried Cauliflower
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cauliflower 1 sliced onion 1 dessertspoonful curry powder 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful stock or water Boil cauliflower in boiling salted water till tender, drain, then divide into small flowerets. Fry onion in Crisco a few minutes, then add curry powder, lemon juice and stock or water. Simmer fifteen minutes, then strain into clean saucepan. Add cauliflower and salt and simmer fifteen minutes. Serve hot.
A straightforward curried vegetable dish from a shortening-company cookbook, with two archaic measures and one timing worth adjusting.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Older British and American books used it freely; here it means about 2 teaspoons of curry powder for a whole cauliflower, which is mild by current taste.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote Crisco, then a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Any neutral oil or butter works; 4 tablespoons is generous for softening one onion, and 2 will do.
- Don't boil the cauliflower fullyThe head is boiled tender and then simmered another fifteen minutes in the sauce, which will reduce it to mush. Boil it only until a knife meets slight resistance, or steam the florets 5 minutes, then finish in the sauce for 5 to 8.
- Break into florets firstCutting the head up before cooking saves time and gives even doneness. The original directs you to boil the head whole and divide it afterwards.
- Bloom the curry powderCommercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty unless it cooks in fat. Add it to the onion and let it fry 30 to 60 seconds before the liquid goes in, stirring so it does not scorch.
- Straining the sauceThe recipe strains the onion out, leaving a smooth gravy. Leaving it in, or pureeing it, gives more body; either way you will have a thin sauce, so reduce it if you want it to cling.
- Stock"Stock" in books of this period usually means household meat stock. Vegetable stock or water with a squeeze more lemon keeps the dish meatless.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to give cooks a reason to buy Crisco, which reached the market in 1911; the shortening appears in nearly every recipe, vegetables included. Curried cauliflower itself is Anglo-Indian in descent — the pattern of frying onion, adding commercial curry powder and a little acid, then finishing a boiled vegetable in the resulting gravy is the standard British household treatment that came back from India through nineteenth-century cookbooks and was thoroughly domesticated by 1900. Curry powder as a single premixed jar is an English commercial convenience rather than an Indian practice, and its presence in an American promotional cookbook shows how ordinary the idea of "a curry" had become for a middle-class weeknight table.