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Boiled Cauliflower
Pick off the outer leaves, and cut off the stem close to the bottom of the flowerets. Wash well in cold water, then place it top downward in a pan of clear, cold water to soak for one hour. Tie it in a piece of cheese cloth, stand in a kettle of boiling water stem downward, add a teaspoonful of salt, cover the kettle, and boil thirty minutes or until the cauliflower is tender. When done lift it carefully from the water, undo the cloth, and stand the cauliflower in a round shallow dish, stem downwards, pour over it Cream Sauce, and serve.
A plain boiled head with cream sauce, from an era when vegetables were cooked well past what we would now call done. The method is sound; the clock is not.
- Cut the time hardThirty minutes turns a whole head to grey mush and drives off the sulphur compounds that make the kitchen smell. A trimmed head of about 2 lb needs 8-12 minutes in boiling water, tested with a knife tip at the thickest point of the stem. Cut into florets it is done in 5-6.
- The hour-long soakStanding the head upside down in cold water was generally given as a way to drive out insects, though this recipe does not say so and calls for plain cold water. With modern supermarket cauliflower it is unnecessary. If you are using garden or farm-stand heads it is still worth doing, with a tablespoon of salt or vinegar in the water.
- The cheeseclothNot decorative. It lets you lift a cooked head out whole without it collapsing, which is the entire point of serving it as a dome. A steamer basket or a wide skimmer does the same job.
- Stem downwardWorth keeping. The recipe soaks the head top down and then boils it stem down. The dense core takes longer to cook through than the curd, which is the usual reason given for the position.
- Cover or notThe original says cover the kettle. A partly open lid lets the sulphur volatiles escape and keeps the curd whiter; a tight lid concentrates both the smell and the yellowing.
- Cream SauceCapitalised as a cross-reference to another recipe in the book, not given here. A standard white sauce of roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or thin cream will stand in. Have it made and warm before the cauliflower comes out, since the head cools fast standing in a shallow dish.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish.
Boiled cauliflower under a white sauce was the default English and American treatment of the vegetable through the nineteenth century. The insistence on serving it whole, stem down in a round shallow dish, belongs to the same era's taste for vegetables presented as an intact form rather than cut up, and the cheesecloth is simply the practical means to that end.