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Vegetables: Cauliflower
Boiled Cauliflower.
Remove the green leaves and the greater part of the stalk. Put the head in a pan of cold water which contains to each quart a teaspoonful salt and a teaspoonful vinegar. Let it soak an hour or more. Put the cauliflower in a large stewpan, stem down, and cover with boiling water.
Add a tablespoonful salt, and cook with the cover of the saucepan partially off, boiling gently all the time. A large, compact head rcquires half an hour, small heads from twenty to twenty-five minutes. Cauliflower begins to deteriorate the moment it is overcooked.
Creamed Cauliflower. 2 cupfuls cooked cauliflower, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, 1 tablespoonful butter, tablespoonful flour, 3 slices toasted bread.
The boiling instructions are sound and worth following closely; the salt-and-vinegar soak is the step most cooks skip and the one that does the real work.
- The hingeCauliflower has a very narrow window: it goes from tender to sulphurous and waterlogged in a minute or two. Start testing the thickest part of the stem with a knife tip at 20 minutes and pull it the moment it yields.
- The soakAn hour in cold salted, acidulated water (1 tsp salt and 1 tsp vinegar per quart) was intended to draw out insects hiding in the curd. Farm cauliflower still benefits; a shrink-wrapped supermarket head can go straight into the pot.
- Lid ajarCooking uncovered or partly uncovered lets sulphur compounds escape rather than condensing back onto the head. The recipe gives no reason for the instruction.
- Salt quantityThe recipe calls for a large stewpan; a tablespoon of salt suits that volume of water and would be too much in a small pan.
- Creamed cauliflower proportionsTwo cupfuls of milk thickened with a single tablespoon of flour and a tablespoon of butter will be thin by modern standards, which generally use more flour and butter for that volume. Season the sauce, fold in the drained cauliflower, and serve over the toast.
- YieldOne large head will serve about four as a side dish; the creamed version is dished on three slices of toast, which implies three servings.
Cauliflower reached English and American kitchens as a luxury vegetable and stayed one for a long time, since it demands cool weather, steady water and careful handling in the field. By the turn of the twentieth century, household manuals like this one treated it as a familiar market vegetable but still felt obliged to warn against overcooking, which suggests they had eaten a good deal of grey, sodden cauliflower. The vinegar soak belongs to a period before commercial washing and packing, when cabbage-family heads routinely arrived with small livestock in them. Serving a creamed vegetable over toast was a standard economy of the era: the bread stretched the dish, absorbed the sauce, and turned a side vegetable into a whole meal without meat.