Cauliflower
Remove the outside leaves. Cut in four parts, tie them together, put in boiling water and let them simmer till the stalk is thoroughly tender, keeping it covered with water, and removing the scum. Boil two hours, drain well and serve with melted butter. You may cook broccoli by the same recipe, except that you cut it in two pieces instead of four.-Mrs. R.
A plain boiled cauliflower of the sort that dominated Anglo-American vegetable cookery for two centuries. One instruction has to go.
- The two hoursThis is the hinge. Cauliflower quarters are tender in 8 to 12 minutes in boiling salted water, whole heads in 15 to 20. Two hours reduces the curd to grey pulp and drives off the sulphur compounds as a smell that fills the house. Test the stalk with a knife tip and stop there.
- Why the original says two hoursNineteenth-century garden cauliflowers were often older, larger and coarser-stalked than supermarket heads, and period cookbooks generally called for far longer vegetable boiling than we now use. Neither condition applies now.
- Salt the waterThe recipe omits it, as many period vegetable recipes do. Use about a tablespoon per gallon; unsalted cauliflower tastes flat and washed out.
- Tying the quartersA sound trick, and worth keeping. Kitchen twine around the four sections holds the florets together so the curd does not break up and cloud the water, and lets you lift the whole thing out at once.
- "Removing the scum"The greyish foam is largely protein and other dissolved plant matter. Skim it if you like; it affects appearance more than flavour. Leaving the pan uncovered helps the sulphur volatiles escape rather than condense back into the water.
- "Melted butter"In a book of this period this usually means drawn butter, a thin white sauce of butter, flour and a little of the cooking water, not simply butter poured from a pan. Either works; plain melted butter with lemon and pepper is the modern reading.
- The broccoli note"Broccoli" here most likely means a sprouting or heading type with a thicker stalk rather than the tight green crowns sold today. Modern broccoli florets need 4 to 6 minutes.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish.
Boiled cauliflower with melted butter was the standard English treatment carried into Virginia kitchens, and it appears in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) among dozens of similarly terse vegetable entries contributed by named local housekeepers — here Mrs. R., one of the many women whose initials stand in for full attribution throughout the book. Cauliflower had been grown in American gardens since the eighteenth century but remained a somewhat genteel vegetable, more demanding of soil and water than cabbage and generally treated as its refined relation. The instruction to keep the head covered with water and skim the scum reflects a period preoccupation with whiteness: a cauliflower that came to table grey or broken was considered a failure of the cook, and some contemporary books go further and call for milk in the water or a cloth wrapped around the head to protect the curd.