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Boiled Cauliflower
Remove the outer leaves and cut off the stem close to the flowers. Wash thoroughly in cold water and soak in cold salted water (top downward) for one hour, allowing one tablespoon of salt to one gallon of water. Then tie it in a piece of muslin or cheesecloth to keep it whole and cook it in slightly salted boiling water until tender, keeping it closely covered. When done, lift it from the water, remove the cloth, stand it in a round dish with the flowers up, pour cream sauce over it and serve at once.- M. F. S.
The method is sound, but the timing and the lid are where a modern cook should part company with it. Cauliflower cooked to the old standard of "tender" goes gray and sulfurous.
- Time it, don't wait for collapseA whole trimmed head takes 12 to 18 minutes in boiling water, depending on size; a knife should meet slight resistance at the core. Older kitchens often ran this to half an hour or more, which is what gave boiled cauliflower its reputation.
- Cook it uncoveredThe instruction to keep the pot "closely covered" traps the sulfur compounds the cabbage family releases and drives them back into the head. Leaving the lid off, with plenty of water at a strong simmer, keeps both the smell and the color in check.
- The hour-long soakSalted water once served to draw out insects hiding between the curds, a real concern with garden or market cauliflower. With supermarket heads a 10-minute soak, or a good rinse with the head held stem-up, is enough.
- The muslin wrapTying the head in cheesecloth is genuinely useful if you want it whole for the table, since it keeps the florets from breaking away and lets you lift the head out without a struggle. A wide skimmer or a steamer insert does the same work.
- Cream sauceThe recipe names it without giving it: 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together without browning, then 1 cup milk or light cream whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Make it while the cauliflower cooks so nothing waits.
- Salt proportionThe soak calls for 1 tablespoon salt per gallon, which is very light. For the cooking water, salt it as you would pasta water so the vegetable itself is seasoned rather than relying on the sauce.
- YieldOne average head serves four as a side dish. Serve immediately; a boiled head held warm continues to soften and weeps water into the sauce.
Boiled cauliflower under a white sauce was a standard genteel treatment of the vegetable in English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward, and presenting the head whole, stem hidden, florets up in a round dish, was much of the point of the exercise. The insistence on a long soak in salted water reflects a period when produce came from a garden or an open market rather than a washed and wrapped supply chain, and cooks expected to find something living in the curd. The initials at the end, "M. F. S.", suggest a reader or contributor attribution of the kind common in compiled cook books drawn from magazine and subscriber submissions.