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Cauliflower, Moulded, with Sauce
Boil four large white cauliflowers in a little thin flour and water until tender, then cut off the stalks and press them head downwards into a hot basin. Turn them into a tureen, and pour round them a little tomato or piquante sauce. Before serving, place the stalks neatly round them. They should look like one immense cauliflower. Time, fifteen to twenty-five minutes to boil. Sufficient for six or eight persons. Probable cost, 4d. or 6d. each.
A Victorian party trick: four heads boiled, packed into a basin and turned out as one giant cauliflower. The method still works, but the boiling time and the quantity both need adjusting to modern produce.
- The flour-and-water liquidThis is a simplified blanc — a thin slurry of flour whisked into the cooking water, used to keep pale vegetables from discolouring. Roughly a tablespoon of flour per quart of salted water, whisked smooth before the cauliflower goes in, and a squeeze of lemon does much the same job.
- Boiling timeThe original allows fifteen to twenty-five minutes for whole heads. Whole modern heads take about 12-15 minutes, florets 5-8. The cauliflower must still hold its shape under pressure, so cook to just-tender rather than soft — collapsed florets turn to purée in the basin.
- How many headsFour cauliflowers for six to eight people is generous by any standard. Two large heads will fill a two-pint basin and feed eight.
- The basinA pudding basin — a plain round-bottomed bowl, about 2 pints. Warm it first, line it with a buttered round of paper if you want a clean turn-out, and pack the heads florets-down so the domed surface faces the plate.
- TureenProbably a deep serving dish here rather than a lidded soup tureen, since the sauce is poured round the base. Any warmed bowl or deep platter with room for sauce works.
- Piquante sauceIn Victorian usage, a brown sauce sharpened with vinegar and finely chopped shallots, gherkins and capers. A modern sauce piquante or a well-seasoned tomato sauce both suit; keep it loose enough to pool rather than coat.
- The stalksDon't discard them. Cooked with the heads and then trimmed off, they are arranged around the base to disguise the join.
- Timing the assemblyCauliflower cools fast once drained and pressed. Have the sauce hot and the dish warm, and turn out immediately before it goes to the table.
Cassell's belongs to the era of the moulded dish, when a good deal of English cookery was judged on whether food could be persuaded to hold a shape — jellies, shapes of rice, timbales, and vegetables pressed into basins. The trick here is purely visual: four ordinary cauliflowers reassembled into one improbable specimen, a centrepiece for a table where the vegetable course was expected to be looked at as well as eaten. Cauliflower itself had been a fashionable garden vegetable in Britain since the seventeenth century, and the flour-and-water bath protects its pale, unblemished whiteness. The habit of cooking white vegetables in a floured liquid is generally traced to French kitchen practice, where a blanc was used for cardoons, salsify and artichoke bottoms as much as for cauliflower.