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Stewed Cauliflower
Soak in cold Choose those that are close, fine and white. Pick off the outer leaves and break the flowerets apart. Soak in water a half hour. Put them in a piece of cheese cloth, and then into a kettle of boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt, and boil for twenty minutes. When done lift them out carefully without breaking, and lay in a colander to drain. Toast squares of bread, butter them while hot, arrange the cauliflower neatly on them and serve with Cream or sauce Hollandaise.
A plain boiled cauliflower dressed on buttered toast, from a period when vegetables were cooked far longer than we would now. The method is sound; the timing is not.
- Cut the boiling timeTwenty minutes will reduce separated florets to mush, and long boiling is what brings out the sulphurous smell of cabbage water. Florets need 5 to 7 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance.
- The cheeseclothTying the florets loosely in cheesecloth is a genuine trick, not fussiness: it keeps them together and lets you lift the whole lot out at once without breaking the florets. Leave slack so water circulates.
- The half-hour soakMost likely intended to draw out insects hiding in the curd, a real concern with unsprayed market cauliflower. With modern produce, 10 minutes in cold water is more than enough, and a rinse will usually do.
- SaltA teaspoon in a large kettle is light by current practice. Season the water like pasta water, about a tablespoon per 4 quarts, so the cauliflower is seasoned through rather than salted at table.
- "Cream"Paired as it is with "sauce Hollandaise", this most likely means a cream sauce -- a white sauce enriched with cream -- rather than pouring cream from a jug: butter, flour, milk or cream and salt.
- Hollandaise and timingMake the hollandaise first and hold it warm off the heat, since it will break if it waits over direct heat or is reheated. Drain the cauliflower well before saucing or the water will thin it on the plate.
- The toastCut the squares thick and toast them dark enough to stand up to the sauce; thin toast dissolves. Butter while hot, as directed, so it soaks in rather than sitting on top.
- YieldOne medium head, about 1 1/2 lb of trimmed florets, serves four as a vegetable course or two as a light supper on toast.
Cauliflower on buttered toast belongs to a genre of late nineteenth-century "made dishes" for vegetables, in which a boiled vegetable was given a starchy base and a rich sauce so it could stand as a course on its own rather than as a mere garnish to meat. That mattered particularly in hot-weather cookery, where the point of a book like this was to get a family through summer without lighting a roasting fire; a kettle of water and a piece of toast asked much less of the kitchen than a joint. The cheesecloth bag was standard equipment in the period and is still the most reliable way to lift a cauliflower out whole.