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Buttered Cauliflower
Break a firm head of cauliflower into sprigs and cook in boiling water until about half done. Take up, drain, and put into a saucepan with two tablespoons of melted butter, the juice of one lemon, two tablespoons of white sauce or of cream, a pinch of cayenne, a little salt, and a small cup of hot water. Cook until tender, take up, strain the gravy, add to it one cup of cream or white sauce, pour over the cauliflower, and serve at once. - Mary Foster Snider.
A two-stage method: the cauliflower is parboiled, then finished in a buttery, acidulated braise whose liquid becomes the base of the sauce. Nothing here is obscure, but the timings assume a much softer vegetable than most cooks want now.
- Don't overcook the parboil"About half done" means roughly 3-4 minutes in well-salted boiling water for florets of an even size. They should still resist a knife tip, since they get a second cooking in the pan.
- The braise is shortIn the covered saucepan with butter, lemon, cream and hot water, tender arrives in about 5-8 minutes depending on floret size. The recipe gives no timing; stop while the stems still have a little bite, or the sulphurous edge comes forward.
- "A small cup of hot water"Probably somewhere around 1/2 cup, though the measure is imprecise. It is there to keep the pan from scorching and to build the gravy.
- White sauceA white sauce of this period is generally a light bechamel, on the order of 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup of milk, seasoned with salt. Cream can stand in throughout, as the recipe allows.
- Straining the gravyThe pan liquid will be thin and a little separated. Strain it, then reduce it by half before whisking in the cup of cream or white sauce, otherwise the finished sauce slides off the cauliflower.
- Lemon and cream togetherA whole lemon's juice into cream will curdle if the mixture boils. Combine off direct heat, warm gently, and do not let it bubble.
- Cayenne"A pinch" here is a seasoning, not a heat note: about 1/8 teaspoon for the whole dish. It is meant to be felt rather than tasted.
- YieldOne medium head serves about four as a side dish.
Cauliflower reached English and American tables as a garden luxury before it became a staple, and nineteenth-century cookbooks treat it with a certain ceremony -- boiled whole and sauced, or broken into sprigs and enriched with butter and cream, as here. The two-stage treatment, parboil then finish in fat and liquid, is a French technique, and it shows in the vocabulary: "white sauce" is bechamel with the French name filed off, a fixture of the era's cooking-school teaching. The recipe carries an attribution to Mary Foster Snider, a reminder that collections of this kind often read as a collective record of what capable home cooks were actually making rather than the work of a single author.