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Boiled Cauliflower
To each half gallon water allow heaped table-spoon salt; choose close and white cauliflower, trim off decayed outside leaves, and cut stock off flat at bottom; open flower a little in places to remove insects which generally are found about the stalk, and let cauliflowers lie with heads downward in salt and water for two hours previous to dressing them, which will effectually draw out all vermin. Then put into boiling water, adding salt in above proportion, and boil briskly for fifteen or twenty minutes over a good fire, keeping the sauce-pan uncovered. The water should be well skimmed. When cauliflowers are tender, take up, drain, and if large enough, place upright in dish; serve with plain melted butter, a little of which may be poured over the flowers, or a white sauce may be used made as follows:
Put butter size of an egg into the sauce-pan, and when it bubbles stir in a scant half tea-cup of flour; stir well with an egg-whisk until cooked; then add two tea-cups of thin cream, some pepper and salt. Stir it over the fire until perfectly smooth. Pour the sauce over the cauliflower and serve. Many let the cauliflower simmer in the sauce a few moments before serving. Cauliflower is delicious served as a garnish around spring chicken, or with fried sweet-breads, when the white sauce should be poured over both. In this case it should be made by adding the cream, flour, and seasoning to the little grease (half a tea-spoon) that is left after frying the chickens or sweet-breads. -Mrs. W. P. Anderson.
A straightforward whole boiled cauliflower with a cream sauce, from an era when the vegetable arrived with its own livestock. Two things need attention: the boiling time and the flour-to-cream ratio in the sauce.
- The soak is still worth doingTwo hours head-down in salted water drives out cabbage aphids and small caterpillars lodged in the curd. Supermarket heads are usually clean, but a 20-30 minute soak in heavily salted cold water costs nothing and is the only reliable way to flush a farmers-market head.
- Cut the boiling timeConsider shortening the boiling time -- Fifteen to twenty minutes suits a large whole head, but a smaller trimmed head is often done in 10-12 minutes in well-salted boiling water, and florets in 5-6. Test the thickest part of the stem with a knife tip, not the flower.
- Leave the lid offThis is not fussiness. Covering the pan traps the sulfur compounds cauliflower releases as it cooks and drives them back into the vegetable, which is where the smell and the sour taste come from. Keep the pan uncovered and the water at a brisk boil.
- Butter size of an eggRoughly 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- The teacup is ambiguousBuckeye Cookery's tea-cup is generally reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, but it is not consistent through the book. A scant half tea-cup of flour against two tea-cups of cream gives a very stiff sauce by current taste. For a pourable coating sauce, 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 1 1/2 cups liquid is the usual proportion; hold back flour rather than adding it.
- Thin creamNineteenth-century thin cream is close to modern half-and-half, around 12 percent fat. Whole milk works and gives a lighter sauce; heavy cream will make the roux ratio here unworkably thick.
- Cook the flour outThe instruction to stir until cooked before the cream goes in matters. Two or three minutes of bubbling removes the raw taste, and the sauce should stay pale, not colour.
- Sweetbreads and pan drippingsThe variation builds the sauce in the frying pan on half a teaspoon of fat, which will not carry a third of a cup of flour. Treat it as a suggestion to deglaze: use the fond for flavour and add butter to make up the roux.
- YieldOne large head serves four as a side dish.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and the signed attributions -- here Mrs. W. P. Anderson -- are the point of the book: it is a community cookbook scaled up to national circulation. Cauliflower in the 1870s American kitchen was a market-garden vegetable rather than a staple, more expensive and more troublesome than cabbage, which is why the recipe spends its first third on insects and its last third on presenting the head whole and upright under a white sauce. The two-hour salted soak was standard advice in English and American cookery of the period, repeated almost word for word from Isabella Beeton and her predecessors, and it survives in modern kitchens mostly for broccoli and cauliflower bought with the leaves still on. The finishing sauce is a plain béchamel by another name; the direction to build it instead from the fat left after frying sweetbreads shows the thrift underneath the company manners.