Olive Cain
(MRS. ROBERT CAIN)
FRIED CAULIFLOWER
1 head cauliflower 1 egg ½ cupful milk 1/4 teaspoonful salt Few grains pepper Fine, dry bread-crumbs Soak the cauliflower, head down, in cold, salted water to dislodge any possible insects; separate into flowerets, and parboil ten minutes. Drain till very dry on a cloth or paper-toweling. Dip first in the egg slightly beaten and mixed with the milk, salt, and pepper, and then in the finely ground bread crumbs.
Fry to a golden brown in deep fat, hot enough to brown a bit of bread in forty seconds.
A straightforward deep-fried cauliflower, written in Boston Cooking-School idiom. The opening clause about green pepper is the tail end of the preceding recipe in the book and has nothing to do with this one.
- Dry is everythingThe florets must be genuinely dry before they meet the egg wash, or the coating slides off in the fat and the oil spits. Spread them on a towel and leave them ten minutes after draining rather than blotting once.
- Fat temperature"Hot enough to brown a bit of bread in forty seconds" is the standard period test for deep fat, used across cookbooks of the era; it corresponds to a fairly hot fat, somewhere in the 370-390F region depending on whose table you follow. A thermometer is faster and more reliable; the bread cube test only tells you the range.
- Parboil lessTen minutes will leave separated florets soft enough to break apart in the batter. Four to five minutes in boiling salted water, until a knife meets slight resistance, holds their shape.
- The milk quantityOne and a half cups of milk to a single egg gives a very thin dip, not a batter. That is intentional here, since the crumbs do the coating work, but if you want more cling use half the milk.
- "Cupful" and "teaspoonful"Read these as the standard American measures, 8 fl oz and a teaspoon. Level measuring had been widely promoted since Fannie Farmer, so level is the likelier reading, though the book does not say so.
- Bread-crumbs"Fine, dry bread-crumbs" means stale bread ground and sieved, closer to store-bought plain crumbs than to panko. Panko will work but fries lighter and browns faster.
- The salted soakSoaking the head stem-up in cold salted water was routine insect insurance for field-grown cauliflower. Modern supermarket heads rarely need it, though it does no harm.
- YieldOne average head serves four as a side dish, three if it is the vegetable course. Fry in batches so the fat does not drop below temperature, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp.
The phrasing points to its source: "hot enough to brown a bit of bread in forty seconds" and the level cupfuls belong to the Boston Cooking-School vocabulary that Fannie Farmer had standardised, and which had become the ordinary way American cookbooks recorded food. Deep-fried breaded cauliflower itself is older and broader than any one kitchen, appearing across Italian, Central European and Anglo-American cooking. The dish is credited to Mrs. Robert Cain, that is, under a husband's name, which was the common form of attribution in contributor cookbooks of the period.