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CAULIFLOWER (a la Francaise)
Cut away the stalk and the green leaves, and divide a cauliflower into quarters. Put the branches into a little vinegar and water, then put them and a table-spoonful of salt into a stewpan with some boiling water, and let them boil until they are done. This may be ascertained by taking a little piece between the finger and thumb, and if, though still firm, it gives way easily, it is sufficiently cooked. Drain the cauliflower and arrange it neatly in a dish. Pour over it a pint of good melted butter. Time to boil, about twelve minutes. Probable cost, 4d. for a medium-sized cauliflower. Sufficient one for two persons.
A plain boiled cauliflower whose entire character rests on the sauce — and on the fact that "melted butter" in a Victorian cookery book is not melted butter.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English usage this means a thickened butter sauce: butter and flour cooked together, whisked smooth with water (occasionally milk) and enriched with more butter. Proportions vary a good deal from book to book. Poured-over plain melted butter would slide straight off the cauliflower and pool in the dish.
- Reduce the quantityA pint of sauce for a cauliflower serving two is enormous by current taste. Half a pint is generous; a quarter-pint is plenty if you want the vegetable to be the point.
- The vinegar-and-water soakAlmost certainly a pest step rather than a flavour one: soaking in salted or acidulated water was the usual way to drive insects out of the curd. Twenty minutes in cold water with a splash of vinegar does it; drain well, since carried-over vinegar will dull the sauce.
- Quarters, not floretsThe recipe keeps the head in four wedges so it can be "arranged neatly." Quarters take longer than small florets, and twelve minutes at a rolling boil is about right for a medium head; test the thickest part of the stalk, not the curd.
- Cook it shortThe finger-and-thumb test is the hinge: firm but yielding. Cauliflower boiled past that point turns grey, smells sulphurous and collapses when you lift it out. Lift with a skimmer or a spider rather than tipping the pan.
- Drain thoroughlyCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in the curd. Stand the wedges cut-side down on a cloth for a minute before dishing, or the sauce will thin into a puddle.
- Salt and costA tablespoon of salt to a pan of water is in line with modern practice for vegetables. The "4d." is a period retail price and tells you only that cauliflower was then a cheap, seasonal item.
- YieldAs written, two servings as a vegetable course. Alongside a roast with other vegetables, one medium head stretches to four.
Cauliflower reached English gardens from the Mediterranean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by the Victorian era was a staple summer and autumn vegetable, cheap enough that Cassell's could quote fourpence for a head. That the sauce is called simply "melted butter" is characteristic of the period: English cookery treated a flour-thickened butter sauce as the default accompaniment to boiled vegetables and boiled fish, and the monotony of English sauces was a standing joke among continental writers. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, arranged such entries alphabetically as reference material for a middle-class household with a cook to instruct, which is why the notes on probable cost and number of persons matter as much as the method.