Home › Vegetables › Broccoli
Broccoli
Pick off all the leaves and cut the stalk close to the bottom of the bunch. Lay in cold water a half-hour. When ready to cook wrap carefully in a piece of cheese cloth, put into a kettle of salted boiling water and boil twenty minutes. When done lift out carefully, untie the cheese cloth and stand the broccoli in a round dish, pour around it a halfpint of Cream Sauce and serve at once. CABBAGE a la CRÉME Cut a young tender head of cabbage in halves, soak in cold water one hour, then drain, and shake dry. Remove the stalk and core and chop the remainder rather fine. Put it in a saucepan, cover with boiling water and boil twenty minutes. Drain in a colander. Put two ounces of butter in a saucepan, place it over a good fire, add the cabbage, a teaspoonful of salt, a quarter teaspoonful of black pepper, sprinkle over it a tablespoonful of flour, add a half-pint of cream or good milk; keep stirring with a wooden spoon As soon as the whole comes to during the whole process. a boil it is ready to serve.
Two vegetable dishes from the era when boiling times were generous and cream sauce was the default finish. Both work, but the timings want cutting hard.
- Twenty minutes is far too longBroccoli boiled twenty minutes turns olive-drab and collapses. Trimmed spears need 4-5 minutes in salted boiling water, a whole head 6-8. The same goes for the cabbage: 5-6 minutes for finely chopped young cabbage, not twenty.
- The cheesecloth wrapThis is the point of the method: the bundle keeps the heads intact so the vegetable can be stood upright on the dish. Tie it loosely so water circulates, and lift by the knot. A steamer basket does the same job with less drama.
- Half a pint of cream sauceOne cup. Presumably a plain white sauce along the lines of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or cream, seasoned; the book's own Cream Sauce recipe is not on this page. Make it before the broccoli goes into the water.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick. For a single head of cabbage that is rich but deliberate; the flour sprinkled over it forms the roux in the pan.
- "A good fire"Medium-high on a gas or electric burner. Enough heat to melt the butter and cook out the flour without browning it, since this sauce should stay white.
- Long cold soakingThe half-hour and one-hour soaks were probably intended to draw out insects from garden produce and crisp the leaves. With supermarket vegetables a rinse is enough, though a soak does no harm and helps limp cabbage.
- YieldEach dish will serve about four as a side, though the recipe gives no yield. The broccoli must go to table immediately; cream sauce on standing broccoli sets and dulls within minutes.
Broccoli was still faintly exotic in English-language cookbooks of this period, usually described as a kind of cauliflower and treated exactly like one: boiled whole, stood upright, and masked with a white sauce. Cabbage a la cr"me shows the same instinct at work on a far cheaper vegetable, dressing it in butter, flour and cream. Both recipes are brief: boil, sauce, serve at once.