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Asparagus, Cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts Or Turnips Hollandaise
Boil or steam the vegetable. Leave the asparagus in the form of tips, break up the cauliflower into flowerets, leave the Brussels Sprouts whole, or slice the turnips. Serve with a garnish of Hollandaise Sauce.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in promotional cookbooks, which assumed the reader already knew how long each vegetable took and owned a hollandaise recipe. The whole dish stands or falls on not overcooking the vegetable and not overheating the sauce.
- The hinge: the sauceHollandaise is an egg-yolk emulsion and breaks above roughly 180F. Make it last, hold it off the heat in a warm (not hot) bowl, and spoon it over the drained vegetable no more than a few minutes before it goes to the table.
- Steam rather than boilThe original allows either, but boiling waterlogs all four of these vegetables and dilutes the sauce on the plate. Steam over an inch of salted water and drain thoroughly; a wet vegetable will make the hollandaise slide off and pool.
- Times, since none are givenAsparagus tips 3-5 minutes, cauliflower florets 5-7, whole Brussels sprouts 8-10, sliced turnip 8-12 depending on thickness. All should be tender at the point of a knife with some resistance left.
- Brussels sproutsMany cookbooks of the period called for long boiling, fifteen to twenty minutes or more, which is often blamed for the vegetable's sulphurous reputation. Left whole as instructed here, they need only to lose their squeak; trim the stem flush and cut an X in large ones so the core cooks with the leaves.
- TurnipsChoose small white turnips, not the large waxed storage kind, which turn bitter and fibrous. Peel deeply and slice a scant half-inch thick so the pieces hold their shape under the sauce.
- "Garnish" here means sauceIn this period the word covered any finishing addition, not merely decoration. Figure about 3/4 cup of hollandaise for four servings, either poured across the middle of the dish or passed separately.
- YieldA pound of asparagus, a medium head of cauliflower, a pound of sprouts or three or four small turnips each serve four as a vegetable course.
The Snowdrift cookbooks were advertising literature for Snowdrift, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and their aim was to show that a cottonseed product could stand in for butter and lard across an entire day's cooking. That explains the oddity of this entry: it is barely a recipe at all, but a pointer toward the book's hollandaise. Hollandaise itself is a French sauce of the classical repertoire whose name is generally traced to an assumed Dutch character rather than to any Dutch original, and by the 1900s American cookbooks treated it as the standard dressing for boiled green vegetables, particularly asparagus.