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CAULIFLOWER (a la Mayonnaise)
Take the required number of cauliflowers, strip them of their leaves, and thoroughly wash them; put them into boiling water with butter and salt. When they are done, but still firm, take the saucepan from the fire and let them cool in the water. When cold, drain them, and put them into a marinade of oil, vinegar, and salt to soak for two hours. Dish them in the form of a pyramid, mask them with a white mayonnaise sauce, and place round them a border of aspic jelly, cut in various fancy shapes. Probable cost, 9d.
A cold cauliflower salad dressed up as a centrepiece, in the late-Victorian manner. The one thing to get right is the boiling: the cauliflower has to stay firm enough to stack and to hold up to two hours in an acid marinade.
- Cook it shortBoil whole heads only until a knife meets slight resistance at the stem, roughly 8-12 minutes depending on size. Anything cooked to true tenderness will slump when you build the pyramid and turn woolly after the marinade.
- Butter in the waterThe butter and salt enrich the cooking water and were held to help keep the curd pale; this is not a true blanc, which uses flour and an acid. A tablespoon of butter and a good teaspoon of salt per litre is plenty; a squeeze of lemon does the whitening job more reliably.
- Cooling in the waterLetting the heads go cold in their cooking liquid is the period method, but it means they carry on cooking in the residual heat. Modern practice is to lift them out and cool them quickly, which is why the initial boil should be timed on the short side either way.
- The marinadeRead it as a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt. Two hours is right for whole or halved heads; if you break the cauliflower into florets first, an hour is enough or the vinegar dulls the texture.
- "White" mayonnaiseThis most likely means plain, uncoloured mayonnaise, as distinct from the tinted (green herb, red) mayonnaises found in Victorian cookery books. It is raw-egg mayonnaise, so use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, and keep the finished dish refrigerated.
- MaskingTo coat cleanly, the mayonnaise wants to be a little slacker than sandwich consistency and the cauliflower must be bone dry, drained and blotted after the marinade. Wet vegetables shed the sauce onto the plate.
- Aspic jellyIn most Victorian kitchens this was made at home: clarified stock set with gelatine or calf's foot, though commercial gelatine was readily bought by this date. A firm savoury jelly from good stock and powdered gelatine, set in a shallow tray and stamped out with cutters, gives the same effect. It is decorative rather than essential.
- Cost and yield9d is the shopping cost in Victorian pence, not a modern guide to anything. One medium head serves four as a first course or side; the pyramid presentation implies two or three heads for a table.
Cassell's places this among the cold dressed vegetables that filled out a late-nineteenth-century buffet or supper table, where dishes were judged as much on architecture as on flavour. The pyramid masked in sauce and ringed with cut aspic belongs to the French service that English cookery books of the 1870s and 80s were busy translating for middle-class households: tin cutters for stamping aspic shapes were sold for the purpose, and aspic was a common standby in kitchens that made their own stock. Cauliflower had been grown in England since the seventeenth century and was widely available by the 1880s. The à la mayonnaise tag was applied freely in this period to almost anything cold and coated, from salmon to chicken to a boiled vegetable.