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Cauliflower Salad
I medium sized head of cauliflower ½ pint of mayonnaise Boil the cauliflower as directed, throw into cold water until wanted, then pick it apart carefully, dry with a soft napkin, put in the salad dish, pour over the mayonnaise, let it stand fifteen minutes, and serve.
A three-ingredient dish where everything depends on the cauliflower being cooked briefly and dried thoroughly. The quantity of mayonnaise is the one figure to treat with suspicion.
- The mayonnaise quantityA pint and a half is three cups, which would drown a single head of cauliflower. Either the book intends a very heavily sauced dish or the figure is a misprint for a half pint; ¾ to 1 cup of mayonnaise coats a medium head generously.
- "Boil as directed"The instruction presumably refers to a separate entry elsewhere in the book, which we do not have here. As a modern substitute: salted water, whole head or large florets, until a knife enters the stem with slight resistance -- roughly 6 to 8 minutes. Nineteenth-century vegetable cookery generally ran much longer, and cauliflower boiled to collapse will not hold up under dressing.
- The cold water plungeThis stops the cooking, and cooling the vegetable promptly is probably why the salad reads as fresh rather than over-boiled. Note that the recipe wants it left in the water "until wanted"; if you would rather not risk waterlogged florets, drain them as soon as they are cold.
- DryingThe napkin is not fussiness. Any surface water thins the mayonnaise and it slides off into a puddle at the base of the dish. Pat dry, then let the florets air a few minutes on the cloth.
- Raw egg in the dressingPeriod mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- The fifteen-minute standLong enough for the dressing to slacken slightly against the cool vegetable and for the flavors to meet. Do not extend it much in a warm room; this is a dish to assemble shortly before it goes to the table.
- YieldA medium head serves four to six as a side salad.
Hot-weather cookery was a recognized genre in American kitchen literature, in an age when summer meant a coal range that made the kitchen unbearable and an icebox that was, at best, a slow melt. The strategy such books recommend is visible here: cook the vegetable once, early, chill it, and serve it cold under a dressing that needs no fire at all. Cauliflower was well established in market gardens and, one imagines, more often served hot with a white sauce or a cheese sauce; dressing it cold with mayonnaise looks like a borrowing from French salad treatment, and turns a heavy vegetable into something a household would eat in August. The habit of listing mayonnaise as a bare ingredient, with a cross-reference rather than a formula, suggests it was assumed knowledge in a kitchen where dressings were made by hand and by feel.