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Cauliflower, Boiled
Cut the stalk close to the bottom, and pare away the tops of the leaves, leaving a circle of shortened leaf-stalks all round. Put the cauliflower head downwards into a little vinegar and water for a quarter of an hour, as this will be sure to draw out the insects. Put it into a pan of boiling water, with a table-spoonful of salt in it. Some persons prefer milk and water. Remove the scum carefully as it rises, or the cauliflower will be discoloured. Boil till tender. This may be ascertained by taking a little piece of the stalk between the finger and thumb, and if it yields easily to pressure it is ready. Drain and serve. Put a lump of butter the size of an egg into a saucepan with a dessert-spoonful of flour. Mix smoothly. Add salt to taste and half a pint of water. Stir the sauce till it boils, and strain over the vegetable. Time: a large cauliflower, fifteen to twenty-five minutes; a small one, twelve to fifteen minutes. Sufficient, a small one for one person. Probable cost, 3d. to 6d.
A straightforward Victorian vegetable dish with a plain white sauce. The only part that needs rethinking is the boiling time, which will reduce a modern cauliflower to mush.
- Cut the time roughly in halfFifteen to twenty-five minutes yields grey, sulphurous, collapsing florets. A whole medium head needs 8-12 minutes in boiling salted water, florets 4-6 minutes; the stalk test in the original is still the right test, but start checking early.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. With a dessert-spoonful of flour (2 teaspoons) this is a very butter-heavy, loose sauce; for a conventional roux consistency use equal weights of butter and flour, around 1 oz each.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. Made with water as written the sauce is thin and bland; made with milk it becomes a béchamel.
- The vinegar soakA quarter of an hour head-down in acidulated water was standard insect insurance when cauliflowers came from the garden with cabbage whites and earwigs in them. Modern heads rarely need it, though a soak in cold salted water is still worth doing with market or allotment cauliflower.
- Milk and waterThe alternative cooking liquid is for colour, not flavour — milk keeps the curd white. A squeeze of lemon in the water does the same job without the pan of scalded milk to wash up.
- SkimmingThe scum is matter cooked out of the vegetable, and it can settle back onto the curd as a dull film. Skim it, or simply cook uncovered at a brisk simmer and lift the head out promptly.
- Serving and yield"A small one for one person" suggests the heads Cassell's had in mind were smaller than today's supermarket cauliflowers. A modern head serves three or four as a side dish.
Boiled cauliflower with a white sauce was a common vegetable dish on the British table from the eighteenth century onwards. The recipe teaches two things at once: how to prepare a vegetable for the pot, and how to build a simple flour-thickened sauce to pour over it. The vinegar soak is the giveaway that this belongs to an era of garden and market produce rather than washed and wrapped heads. Long boiling, and the whiteness that milk in the water preserves, are characteristic of Victorian vegetable cookery. Cauliflower is generally traced to the eastern Mediterranean and is recorded in English gardens by the seventeenth century, where it was long treated as the aristocrat of the cabbage family and often served, as here, with nothing more elaborate than butter and flour.