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Cauliflower with Cream Sauce
Pick off the outer leaves, cut off the stem close to the bottom of the flowerets; wash the head well in cold water, then soak, the top downward, in a pan of clear, cold water one hour. Place the head in a vegetable basket or tie in a piece of cheese-cloth, stand in a kettle of boiling, salt water, stems downward; cover the kettle and boil
The text breaks off mid-instruction, so the boiling time and the sauce itself are missing; what survives is the preparation method, and it is a sound one. A few notes on translating it.
- The hour-long soakSoaking head-down in cold water was standard because unwashed garden cauliflower harboured insects, which float out. Supermarket heads rarely need it; twenty minutes in salted cold water is ample if you want the insurance.
- Cook it stem downThe thick stem and core need longer than the curd, and standing the head stems downward is the position the recipe asks for. If the head is not fully submerged, the dense part sits in the hottest water and the florets are spared the roughest of the boil.
- Cheesecloth or basketThe wrapping exists to lift a whole cooked head out intact. A steamer insert or a wide skimmer does the same job; without one, a cooked head risks breaking apart as you lift it.
- TimingThe original text is cut off before it gives one. A whole medium head boils in 12 to 18 minutes, and is done when a knife slides into the stem with no resistance. Some period cookbooks call for considerably longer, which produces grey, sulphurous, collapsing cauliflower.
- Keeping it whiteBoil uncovered rather than covered, despite the instruction here. A lid traps the sulphur compounds that dull the colour and sharpen the smell. A spoonful of lemon juice or milk in the water also helps.
- The missing cream sauceThe title implies a plain white sauce: two tablespoons butter, two of flour, a cup of milk or cream, salt and white pepper, cooked until it coats a spoon. Poured over the drained head, not tossed with it.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish.
Cauliflower with a white or cream sauce was a familiar genteel vegetable dish on English and American tables through the nineteenth century, helped by the fact that the whole head presented well: it came to the table intact, sauced, and could be cut in wedges at the table. The technique here, boiling in a cloth or wire basket, comes from a period before steamer inserts were common kitchen equipment. The long cold soak points to a time when cauliflower came from the garden or the market stall rather than washed and wrapped, and period cookbooks do warn about insects in the curd. The milk-and-flour sauce is the sort of white sauce Anglo-American cookery had thoroughly domesticated, applied to a wide range of boiled vegetables.