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Cauliflower, with Parmesan Cheese
Choose three or four young, firm, white cauliflowers, cut off the stalks and the stems, making them flat, so that they will stand nicely in the dish. Cleanse them thoroughly, and boil them until tender, but not sufficiently so to run any risk of their breaking. Dish them in such a way as to make them look like one cauliflower, and powder them thickly with grated Parmesan cheese. Pour a good sauce over this. When it is firmly set, add another layer of cheese, and strew over this some finely-grated bread-crumbs. The sauce may be made thus. Rub a table-spoonful of flour into half an ounce of fresh butter, mix it smoothly over the fire, and add very gradually a breakfast-cupful of water, one pinch of salt, and a small pinch of pepper. Stir it constantly till it boils, then take it from the fire for a minute or two, and add slowly the yolk of an egg mixed with the juice of half a lemon and a tea-spoonful of water. Stir until the whole is well mixed. Brown the cauliflower with a salamander or in a hot oven, pour a little sauce round, and serve hot, as a third course dish. Time to boil the cauliflower, twelve to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. or 6d. each. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian vegetable course that assembles several small cauliflowers into one dome, sauced with a lemon-and-yolk velouté. The sauce is the part that needs attention: once the yolk goes in it must not return to a boil.
- The hinge: the yolkThe instruction to take the pan off the fire "for a minute or two" before adding the yolk is doing real work. Let the sauce drop below about 180F, add the yolk-lemon-water mixture in a thin stream while stirring, and do not reboil, or it will scramble into threads.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so read this as about 1 cup of water. With 1 tablespoon flour and 1/2 oz butter the sauce is deliberately thin; it thickens further with the yolk.
- Salamander, or the broilerA salamander was an iron plate heated in the fire and held over the dish to glaze it. A broiler element 4 to 5 inches away does the same job in 2 to 3 minutes; the recipe gives no temperature for its alternative "hot oven", but a modern oven at 425-450F is a reasonable reading.
- Cauliflower sizeThe recipe wants three or four heads so that they can be built into a single mound. Two modern heads, or one large one broken into firm sections, will serve six.
- Boiling timeTwelve to twenty minutes is for whole heads (the recipe does not say how they are boiled). Test with a knife tip at the thickest part of the stem at 10 minutes; the recipe is right that they must stay firm enough to stack, so stop while there is still resistance.
- DrainingNothing ruins this dish faster than water leaching out under the sauce. Invert the boiled heads on a cloth for a few minutes before dishing them.
- ParmesanGrate it finely from a block rather than using pre-grated cheese, which is drier and browns unevenly. About 2 oz total, split between the two layers.
- Serving"A third course dish" places it in the third course of a formal dinner, among the entremets, which took in vegetable dishes as well as sweets. Served as a modern side or a light lunch it feeds four to six; assemble it in the dish you intend to bring to the table, as it will not move once glazed.
The recipe joins two techniques: boiling a delicate vegetable to the point of tenderness without collapse, and finishing a white sauce with egg yolk and acid, which is the same principle behind hollandaise and the older "Dutch sauce" of English kitchens. Cauliflower reached English gardens from the Mediterranean by the seventeenth century and by the late Victorian period was cheap enough that the book can quote 4d. or 6d. a head, yet grand enough to carry Parmesan, an imported luxury grated to order. The salamander named at the end was standard equipment in a coal-range kitchen: an iron disc on a long handle, heated until glowing and passed over a dish to brown the top without cooking it further. Its disappearance is why the recipe's alternative, a hot oven, is the usual route today, though the name survives in the professional overhead broiler still called a salamander.