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Vegetables: Cook
Break the cauliflower into branches and season with half the salt and pepper. Put the butter in a saucepan. When hot, add the flour, and stir until smooth, then add the milk, stirring all the time. When the sauce boils, add salt, pepper, and cauliflower. Cook ten minutes; serve on toast.
Brussels Sprouts Blanched.
Remove wilted or yellow leaves from the sprouts, cut the stocks close to the head, and soak in salted cold water for an hour or more. Drain and put into boiling water. Allow 1 teaspoonful salt to 2 quarts water.
Two fragments run together here: a cauliflower in white sauce, and the opening of a method for blanching Brussels sprouts. Neither gives quantities, so the amounts have to be inferred from standard practice of the period.
- Missing quantitiesThe recipe refers to "half the salt and pepper" and to butter, flour and milk without amounts, which means the original list has been lost in the excerpting. A workable white sauce for one medium head is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk.
- "Branches"This means florets, cut down through the stem so each piece keeps a bit of the core. Keep them of even size or the sauce will hold some pieces raw while others collapse.
- The hinge: cook the flour before the milkButter and flour need a minute or two of stirring over moderate heat before the milk goes in, or the sauce tastes pasty. Add the milk gradually and keep stirring to avoid lumps.
- Ten minutes in the sauceRaw florets will not soften properly in simmering sauce in ten minutes; the milk is likelier to scorch first. Boil or steam the cauliflower until just tender, drain it well, then fold it into the finished sauce and heat through for two or three minutes.
- Serve on toastA common Victorian and Edwardian way of turning a vegetable dish into a supper course. Use bread toasted dry and firm, and spoon over at the last moment so it does not go to pulp.
- The sprouts entryBlanching here means the preliminary boil, not modern blanch-and-shock for freezing. The hour-long soak in cold salted water was intended to draw out insects from the tight heads, which is rarely necessary with trimmed supermarket sprouts.
- Salt ratioOne teaspoon to two quarts is light by present taste; a tablespoon to four quarts gives sprouts that need less seasoning at the table. Cook them uncovered and briefly, 6 to 8 minutes, so they stay green rather than sulphurous.
- YieldOne medium head of cauliflower with a cup of sauce serves four as a side, or two on toast as a light main.
White sauce over a boiled vegetable is the domestic descendant of French sauce béchamel, absorbed into English and American cookery through the nineteenth century until the butter-flour-milk roux was a staple of household manuals. Books of the Household Discoveries type were compendia rather than curated cookbooks, gathering vegetable cookery, cleaning hints and home repairs between the same covers; entries here are compressed to the point of dropping their ingredient lists. Cauliflower and Brussels sprouts both belong to the cool-weather brassicas that dominated late autumn tables before year-round shipping; the sprout takes its name from long association with the market gardens around Brussels, a link generally traced to the region but not documented much before the eighteenth century. The instruction to soak heads in cold salted water is a reminder that vegetables then arrived from the garden or market unwashed and often inhabited.