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Cauliflower Salad
Stand a firm white cauliflower in salt water for half an hour, then cook it in boiling water until tender but not quite done. Drain, cool, cut into sprigs and arrange these neatly in a salad bowl lined with tender leaves. Mash the yolks of four hard-boiled eggs and cut the whites into petals, arrange these like daisies over the cauliflower and pour over a plain French dressing. Serve verv cold. -Mary Foster Snider.
A cold composed salad that depends entirely on the cauliflower being drained dry and stopped short of softness. The instruction that matters most is "tender but not quite done" — a floret that collapses will not hold a shape under dressing.
- The salt-water soakHalf an hour in cold salted water was standard practice for drawing out insects and grit from head vegetables. With modern cauliflower it is optional, though a soak does help if the curd is tightly packed and dusty at the base.
- Cooking timeThe recipe boils the head whole and cuts it into sprigs afterwards. Florets take roughly 5 to 7 minutes; a whole head takes considerably longer, depending on size. Test with a knife tip at the stem. Overcooked cauliflower turns sulphurous and waterlogged, and no dressing will rescue it.
- Cool it properlyDrain and spread the sprigs on a towel rather than leaving them heaped in the colander. Residual heat keeps cooking them, and trapped water thins the dressing on the plate.
- "Sprigs"Small florets with a short stem, cut so each piece stands up on its own. Cut from the underside through the stem so the curd stays intact.
- Plain French dressingIn this period that means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to combine — not the sweetened orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today.
- The daisy garnishSieve the mashed yolks for the centres and cut the whites into narrow wedges for petals. Assemble on the cauliflower and dress at the last moment, or the dressing will slide the petals out of place.
- YieldOne medium head and four eggs will serve about four to six as a side salad. Best assembled within an hour of serving and kept refrigerated until it goes to the table.
Cauliflower salads appear steadily in American cookbooks from the 1880s onward, part of a broader fashion for serving cooked vegetables cold under an oil-and-vinegar dressing — a habit borrowed from French salades composées. The decorative touch here is equally of its period: hard-boiled egg, sieved yolk and cut white were a standard palette for garnishing cold dishes, and the "daisy" arrangement belongs to the same taste for pictorial salads that produced moulded aspics and radish roses.