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CAULIFLOWER (a la Polona'se)
Trim, wash, and drain a nice firm cauliflower, and divide the head into pieces of about equal size. Cook in salted water till they are about three parts done. Pour off the water, add an ounce of fresh butter, season with pepper and grated nutmeg, and finish in the oven. Dish up on a hot vegetable dish, and sprinkle brown bread-crumbs over. Probable cost, 6d.
A brief, workmanlike version of a classic garnish. The original assumes you know what "three parts done" means and gives no oven temperature, so both need pinning down.
- "Three parts done"Boil the florets until roughly three-quarters cooked — about 4-5 minutes for medium florets in well-salted water, when a knife meets slight resistance at the core. They finish in the oven, and cauliflower taken to full tenderness first will collapse into mush.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 10-15 minutes is right: long enough to warm through and take a little colour, short enough that the florets hold their shape.
- Drain properlyTip the florets into a colander and let them steam dry for a minute before buttering. Wet cauliflower will stew rather than roast, and the butter will pool instead of coating.
- Brown bread-crumbsThese are dried crumbs from stale bread, browned — not the soft fresh crumbs of a stuffing. In the full Polonaise treatment they are fried in butter until golden and scattered over at the last moment so they stay crisp. Panko toasted in butter is a reasonable stand-in.
- What the recipe leaves outA garnish à la polonaise normally includes sieved or finely chopped hard-boiled egg and chopped parsley alongside the buttered crumbs. Cassell's has pared it back to crumbs alone; adding the egg and parsley brings it in line with the classic version.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons, which is modest for a whole head. Melt it and toss the florets in it rather than dotting it on, or the seasoning lands unevenly.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and keep it light — a few strokes across the whole dish. Pre-ground nutmeg from a jar reads as dusty here.
- Yield and costOne medium head serves four as a side. "Probable cost, 6d." is sixpence in pre-decimal currency, a price note Cassell's attached to most entries for household budgeting; it tells you nothing about the method.
À la polonaise — "in the Polish style" — is one of the standing garnishes of the nineteenth-century French kitchen repertoire. It denotes buttered browned crumbs, usually with sieved hard-boiled egg and parsley, spooned over a boiled green vegetable; cauliflower and asparagus are the usual recipients, and the treatment is still standard in Polish cooking, where buttered crumbs (bułka tarta) go over everything from cauliflower to pierogi. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class British households, absorbed dozens of these French menu terms and set them out in plain English with a price attached, so a cook who had seen "chou-fleur à la polonaise" on a restaurant card could produce something like it at home for sixpence.