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Savory Cauliflower
Cook the cauliflower as in above recipes and set aside to cool. Prepare a pint of egg batter and add to it a teaspoon of minced parsley and a tablespoon of grated mild cheese. Dip each sprig of cauliflower in this batter and fry in butter. When done place on a hot dish and serve at once.
A fritter recipe that assumes you already have cooked cauliflower on hand and know what "egg batter" means. Both assumptions need filling in.
- The hinge: undercook the cauliflowerStop short of full tenderness -- The florets get a brief second cooking in the pan, so it is worth halting the boiling or steaming while a knife still meets slight resistance, roughly 5-7 minutes for medium sprigs. Cauliflower boiled to full tenderness tends to break apart when you try to dip it.
- Cool and dry itThe instruction to set it aside to cool is not just for handling. Batter slides off warm, damp cauliflower; blot the sprigs on a towel and let them come to room temperature before dipping.
- "Egg batter"In cookery of this period this generally means a thin coating batter of beaten eggs, flour and milk, about the consistency of heavy cream. A workable ratio is 2 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1 cup flour and a good pinch of salt, which comes to roughly the pint called for.
- A pintTwo cups, and considerably more batter than a single head of cauliflower needs. Halve it unless you are feeding a crowd or frying something else alongside.
- "Mild cheese"The book means a young, unassertive cheese rather than a sharp aged one, so a mild Cheddar, Monterey Jack or a young Gouda. Grated Parmesan works but shifts the dish toward something saltier than intended.
- Frying in butterWhole butter browns and burns before the batter sets at frying heat. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, and keep the pan at a steady medium so the coating colors in 2-3 minutes a side.
- Yield and servingOne medium head serves four as a side. Fritters go limp within minutes, so the instruction to serve at once is meant literally; hold them uncovered on a rack in a 200F oven if you must fry in batches.
Battered and fried vegetables run all through late nineteenth-century American cookery. This recipe opens by pointing back to "above recipes" instead of repeating the boiling instructions, a common convention in books that grouped several preparations of one vegetable together, and reworking already-cooked vegetables into a dressed-up second dish was a familiar economy. The parsley and grated cheese in the batter mark it as the "savory" version, distinguishing it from plain fritters, and the choice of butter rather than deep fat suggests a shallow pan on a range top rather than the kettle of lard a fried dish might otherwise have required.