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Cauliflower with Cheese
Boil the cauliflower as directed in recipe for Boiled Cauliflower. Make a half pint of Cream Sauce, add to it four tablespoonfuls of grated cheese (Parmesan the best), pour this over the cauliflower and serve.
CORN BOILED ON THE cob Corn should be cooked as quickly as possible after it is picked, or it heats, thereby losing its sweetness. If necessary to keep it over night, spread it out singly on the cold cellar floor. When ready to cook remove the husks and every thread of silk. Have ready a kettle of freshly boiled water, throw in the corn and boil, after it begins to boil, five minutes, take out, place in a cloth and then on a platter and serve immediately.
Two short entries run together here: a cheese sauce for boiled cauliflower, and instructions for corn on the cob. Both are sound, and both assume a cook who already knows the base recipes being referenced.
- Half a pint of cream sauceThat is one cup (about 240 ml). The book's own Cream Sauce recipe is not given here; a standard white sauce of this period would be something on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and a cup of milk or cream, seasoned. Four tablespoons of grated Parmesan stirred in off the heat will thicken it slightly more.
- Add the cheese off the boilParmesan added to a sauce still bubbling can turn grainy and release its fat. Pull the pan from the heat, let it stop steaming hard, then stir the cheese in.
- Boiling the cauliflowerThe referenced method is not reproduced on this page. For a whole trimmed head, boil until a knife slides into the stalk, about 12 to 15 minutes for a medium head. Drain it stem-up so water does not pool in the curd and dilute the sauce.
- A finish the recipe does not mentionThis is essentially cauliflower au gratin without the gratinéeing. If you want a browned top, sauce the drained head in a shallow dish, scatter another spoonful of Parmesan, and put it under the broiler for two or three minutes.
- Corn: the freshness ruleThe insistence on cooking corn immediately reflects pre-refrigeration reality, when the sweet-corn varieties of the day lost sugar to starch very quickly after picking. Modern supersweet varieties hold their sugar far longer, so corn from a shop is usually fine — but the advice still holds for anything picked yourself.
- The cellar floorSubstitute the refrigerator, husks on, in a loose bag. A cold cellar floor was among the coolest surfaces available to a household without ice; it is not a standard you need to reproduce.
- Five minutes is rightCorn dropped into already-boiling water needs three to five minutes and no more; longer toughens the kernel skins. Many cooks avoid salting the water on the belief that it firms the hulls, though this is traditional lore rather than demonstrated.
- YieldA medium head of cauliflower with a cup of sauce serves four as a side. Allow one to two ears of corn per person.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to the American summer-cookery genre that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, when the aim was to feed a household without keeping a coal range roaring through July — hence the preference for quick boiling over long baking. Cauliflower in a cheese sauce is the plain English-American cousin of French chou-fleur au gratin, down to the recommendation of Parmesan over a local cheese. The corn entry is the more distinctly American of the two, and its anxiety about sweetness is real history: before the supersweet hybrids of the modern era, sugar in a picked ear began converting to starch almost at once, which is why the pot was to be boiling before the corn was pulled.