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Cauliflower Fritters
Sprinkle a little cayenne over some cooked sprigs of cauliflower, dip each one separately in batter, and fry for three minutes in boiling fat. Arrange in a heap on a hot dish, and garnish with crisp parsley. Probable cost, 6d.
A short entry that assumes you already have cooked cauliflower to hand and a pan of fat at frying heat. The details it leaves out are the ones worth pinning down.
- Start with firm, dry floretsThe cauliflower should be boiled or steamed only until barely tender, then drained and left to dry completely. Wet or soft sprigs shed their batter in the fat and turn to mush inside it.
- "Boiling fat"This means fat at frying heat rather than literally boiling; in modern terms something in the region of 350-375F, though the book gives no temperature. Beef dripping and lard were both in common use for frying at the time; a neutral oil behaves the same way. Three minutes suits a hot pan and already-cooked florets, which need only to colour the coating through.
- BatterThe recipe assumes a coating batter without specifying one. A frying batter of this period is flour, salt, egg and enough milk or water to coat. A thin batter gives a lacier crust; a thick one insulates the vegetable better.
- CayenneA very little goes a long way — an eighth of a teaspoon across a whole head. Season the cauliflower itself with salt at the same time, since the batter will otherwise taste flat.
- Crisp parsleyVictorian shorthand for parsley fried briefly in the same fat until it stops spitting and turns brittle, a matter of seconds. Dry the sprigs thoroughly first, as wet parsley will make the fat erupt.
- Cost and yieldSixpence was the cost of the whole dish, not a serving. One medium cauliflower makes enough fritters for four as a side or savoury course.
- Serve at onceFried in a heap and left standing, these steam themselves soft. Drain briefly on paper and take them to the table immediately.
In an entry like this one the technique, not the vegetable, was the lesson: almost anything cooked and cooled could be dipped in batter and fried, and Victorian kitchens leaned hard on that fact to use up what was left from an earlier meal. Fritters of cauliflower, salsify, artichoke bottoms and celery all appear in the household manuals of the period, usually as a hot savoury or a garnish for a larger dish rather than a course in their own right. The quoted "probable cost" was a standard feature of Cassell's, aimed at the mistress of a modest household budgeting her table; sixpence marks this as a cheap dish, cauliflower being an abundant late-summer and autumn crop in English market gardens.