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Some Kitchen Kinks: Beat
Beat the butter and flour together until creamy, then stir into the contents of the stewpan. Simmer ten minutes, being careful not to scorch the sauce; serve very hot.
Cabbage with Sausage. 6 sausages. 1 quart minced cabbage. ½ teaspoonful pepper.
Salt. if necessary.
Fry the sausages crisp and brown.
Take from the frying pan and pour off all but three tablespoonsful of the fat. Put the minced cabbage in the frying pan and cook six minutes.
Arrange in a hot dish and garnish with the sausages. Serve mashed potatoes with this dish. Purée of Cabbage and Potatoes. 1 pint boiled finely-minced cabbage. 6 medium-sized potatoes. 2 tablespoonsful butter or savory drippings. 2 teaspoonsful salt. 1/2 teaspoonful pepper. 1/2 pint hot milk.
Peel the potatoes and put them in a stewpan with boiling water enough to cover them. Cook just thirty minutes. Pour off the water and mash fine and light. Beat in the hot milk, seasoning, and cabbage. Cook about five minutes longer.
Cauliflower.-This vegetable, which a few years ago was a luxury, is now cultivated by nearly all market gardeners, and is within the means of all housekeepers. It is a most delicious vegetable, when properly cooked, and vile when improperly cooked, which generally means when overcooked.
Remove all the large green leaves and the greater part of the stalk. Put the head down in a pan of cold water which contains to each quart a teaspoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of vinegar. Let it soak in this water an hour or more. This is to draw out worms, if any should be hidden in the vegetable. When ready to cook the cauliflower put it into a large stewpan, stem end down, and cover generously with boiling water. Add a tablespoonful of salt and cook with the cover of the saucepan partially off, boiling gently all the time. A large, compact head will require a full half hour, small heads from twenty to twenty-five minutes. If the flowers are loose the heat penetrates to all parts quickly. When compact a little extra time should be allowed for the cooking, but the time must never exceed the half hour.
The cauliflower begins to deteriorate the moment it begins to be overcooked.
Overcooking, which is very common, can be told by the strong flavor and dark color. It makes the vegetable not only unpleasant to the eye and palate, but indigestible also. If this vegetable must be kept warm for any length of time, cover the dish with a piece of cheese cloth. In hotels and restaurants it is better to blanch it, chill with cold water, and then heat in salted boiling water when needed.
Creamed Cauliflower. 1 pint cooked cauliflower. 1 pint milk. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1/3 teaspoonful pepper. 1 tablespoonful butter. 1/2 tablespoonful flour. 3 slices toasted bread.
APPENDIX Have the cooked cauliflower broken into branches and seasoned with half the salt and pepper. Put the butter in a saucepan and on the fire. When hot add the flour and stir until smooth and frothy, then gradually add the milk, stirring all the time.
When the sauce boils add the salt, pepper, and the cauliflower. Cook 10 minutes and dish on the slices of toast. Serve very hot.
Broccoli. This vegetable is a species of cauliflower and can be cooked and served in the same manner.
A run of cabbage and cauliflower dishes from the vegetable chapter, written when brassicas were boiled far longer than anyone would boil them now. The proportions are sound; the timings are the part to argue with.
- Cauliflower timingThirty minutes of gentle boiling gives grey, sulphurous cauliflower, which is precisely what the author warns against a few lines later in the same paragraph. A whole trimmed head takes about 10-15 minutes in salted boiling water, or 6-8 minutes broken into florets; test the thickest stem with a knife tip.
- Potatoes for the purée"Cook just thirty minutes" assumes whole medium potatoes in boiling water. Cut into even 2-inch pieces they are done in 15-20 minutes. Drain and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing, or the purée will be watery once the cabbage goes in.
- The pepper in the sausage dish1½ teaspoons of black pepper to a quart of cabbage is a heavy hand by current taste, and probably reflects coarser, older ground pepper. Start with half and add more. Salt "if necessary" means taste after the sausage fat has seasoned the cabbage.
- Six minutes of cabbageThat is enough only if the cabbage is genuinely minced fine. A quart of shredded cabbage weighs somewhere around three-quarters of a pound; keep the pan hot and uncrowded so it browns at the edges rather than steaming.
- Creamed cauliflower sauceHalf a tablespoon of flour to a pint of milk gives a very loose sauce that will soak the toast through. Use a full tablespoon of flour to the tablespoon of butter for a béchamel that coats, and add the cooked cauliflower only at the end so it warms through in two or three minutes rather than ten.
- Vessels and fatsA stewpan here is simply a saucepan or deep sauté pan. "Savory drippings" means saved meat fat, usually beef or bacon; butter or a spoonful of bacon fat does the same job.
- The worm soakAn hour in salted, acidulated water is what the book prescribes for garden cauliflower, and it still works for anything from a market stall or allotment. Supermarket heads rarely need it; a 10-minute soak in cold salted water is ample.
- YieldThe sausage dish serves three to four; the cauliflower on toast is portioned by the recipe's three slices of toast; the cabbage and potato purée, built on six potatoes, serves four to six as a side.
The aside on cauliflower is the most revealing thing on the page: within living memory of the writer it had been a luxury, and the spread of market gardening had brought it into ordinary kitchens, which is exactly the sort of shift household manuals of the period liked to record. The insistence that overcooked cauliflower is not merely unpleasant but "indigestible" belongs to the same era's preoccupation with digestion as the measure of good cooking, and the hotel note — blanch, chill, reheat to order — shows a professional kitchen technique being passed to domestic readers. The purée of cabbage and potatoes sits in the broad family of mashed potato-and-greens dishes found across northern Europe, of which Irish colcannon and English bubble and squeak are the best-known relatives.