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Cauliflower with Stuffing
Choose a saucepan the exact size of the dish intended to be used. Cleanse a large, firm, white cauliflower, and cut it into sprigs; throw these into boiling salted water for two minutes; then take them out, drain, and pack them tightly with the heads downwards, in the saucepan, the bottom of which mut have been previously covered with thin slices of bacon. Fill up the vacant spaces with a stuffing made of three table-spoonfuls of finely-minced veal, the same of beef suet, four table-spoonfuls of breadcrumbs, a little pepper and salt, a tea-spoonful of chopped parsley, a tea-spoonful of minced chives, and a dozen small mushrooms finely chopped. Strew these ingredients over the cauliflowers in alternate layers, and pour over them three well-beaten eggs. When these are well soaked, add sufficient nicely-flavoured stock to cover the whole. Simmer gently till the cauliflowers are tender, and the sauce very much reduced; then turn the contents of the saucepan upside down on a hot dish, and the cauliflowers will be found standing in a savoury mixture. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 4d. to 6d. for a large cauliflower. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A moulded cauliflower dish built in the pan and turned out whole. The success or failure of it is entirely in the packing.
- Pack it tightThe florets have to be wedged in heads-down with no slack, so the mass holds together when inverted. A straight-sided saucepan or small casserole matched to the serving dish is the point of the first line; a wide pan will give you a collapsed heap.
- Minced vealGround veal is stocked irregularly now. Ground pork, or veal cut from a shoulder chop and chopped fine, both work; the stuffing wants fat and softness rather than a distinct meaty texture.
- Beef suetThree tablespoons of fresh beef suet, chopped or grated. Shredded packet suet is a reasonable stand-in, as is very cold butter grated coarse, though the set will be softer.
- Bacon liningUse thin, unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta. Modern heavily smoked bacon will dominate the cauliflower and mushrooms entirely.
- BlanchingTwo minutes in boiling salted water is right — it only makes the sprigs pliable. Any longer and they will not survive being packed and turned out.
- The eggsThree beaten eggs poured over and left to soak act as the binder. Let them genuinely settle into the crumbs for a few minutes before the stock goes in, or they float and cook as ribbons.
- Stock and reductionAdd just enough to cover; the finished dish depends on the liquid reducing to a thick savoury bed rather than a broth. Keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered or only partly covered so it can reduce, and check at 35 minutes — cauliflower is tender well before three-quarters of an hour if the sprigs are small.
- Turning outRest the pan off the heat for five minutes so the egg-bound stuffing firms, then invert onto a heated dish in one movement.
- YieldAs stated, four or five as a side or a light supper dish. Reheating is poor; it is meant to go straight to table.
Cassell's placed this among its cauliflower entries at a time when the vegetable was still treated as worth serious cookery rather than a boiled adjunct to meat. The construction — vegetables packed into a lined mould, bound with forcemeat and egg, cooked in stock and turned out — is straight out of the French repertoire of the period, where such a thing would be called a chartreuse: a dish assembled upside down in a lined pan so that the arrangement is revealed only when it is inverted. The name is often traced to the Carthusian monks and their meatless diet, though the versions that reached English kitchens were rarely vegetarian, and this one carries bacon, veal and suet. The costing of fourpence to sixpence for a large cauliflower, and the assumption that a cook has stock and a scrap of minced veal to hand, are part of the same practical framing.