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Stewed Cauliflower (I head of cauliflower I)
I head of cauliflower, 1 tablespoonful of butter, Yolks of three eggs, ¼ teaspoonful of pepper, 1/2 pint of stock, 4 slices of bread, 6 mushrooms, ½ teaspoonful of onion juice, 1 tablespoonful of flour, Grating of nutmeg, ½ teaspoonful of salt.
For this select a cauliflower close and white. Pick off the outer leaves and break apart the flowerets; wash well in cold water, throw in a kettle of boiling water, add one teaspoonful of salt and boil briskly until the stalks feel tender (about twenty or twenty-five minutes). When done, lift carefully with a skimmer, place them on the squares of bread that have been toasted and buttered while hot. Put the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, mix; add the stock, stir continually until it boils; add the mushrooms chopped fine, cook a moment longer. Take from the fire, add the beaten yolks of the eggs, salt, pepper, nutmeg and onion juice. Pour this around the cauliflower and serve at once.
The sauce must not be boiled after the eggs are added or it will curdle.
I cauliflower, CAULIFLOWER au GRATIN.
1 tablespoonful of flour, 1½ teaspoonful of salt, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1/2 pint of milk, 4 tablespoonfuls of grated cheese.
Boil the cauliflower as directed in Cauliflower with Cream Sauce. When done, drain carefully and put into a baking dish. Put the butter in a frying pan, when melted add the flour, mix till smooth, add the milk, stir continually until it boils, then add the salt and cheese. Pour this over the cauliflower and serve at once.
I cauliflower,
A boiled cauliflower served on toast under a mushroom-and-egg-yolk sauce — essentially a velouté finished with a liaison. The whole dish stands or falls on how you handle the yolks.
- The hinge: never boil the finished sauceOnce the yolks go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer or it will scramble, as the recipe itself warns. Pull the pan off the heat, let it stop bubbling for a few seconds, then whisk in the yolks; return to very low heat only long enough to thicken, keeping it well short of a boil.
- Temper the yolksBeat the yolks in a bowl and whisk a ladleful of the hot stock sauce into them before adding the mixture back to the pan. The original does not say this, but it is the difference between a smooth sauce and a grainy one.
- Cooking timeTwenty to twenty-five minutes of brisk boiling will give you very soft florets by modern taste. Eight to ten minutes for broken-up florets, tested with a knife tip at the thickest stalk, keeps the texture and the flavour.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of stock is one cup. The seasoning quantities in this text are unclear where fractions are involved: read them as about 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1/2 teaspoon onion juice, and season to taste at the end.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without texture. Grate a peeled onion on a box grater and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or press a wedge in a garlic press.
- MushroomsSix mushrooms probably means small cultivated buttons, perhaps 3 to 4 ounces in all. Chopped fine and added to the boiling sauce they will release water, so let the sauce return to the boil and thicken again before the yolks go in.
- The toastToast and butter the bread while the cauliflower drains, not before — it needs to be hot and crisp when the wet florets land on it, or it turns to paste.
- YieldFour servings, one toast square each, as a supper dish or a substantial vegetable course.
Cauliflower reached the English and American table as a luxury vegetable, needing more care and a longer season than cabbage, and nineteenth-century cookbooks treat it accordingly: boiled whole or in florets and then dressed with a sauce rich enough to justify the trouble. The technique here is generally traced to the classic French liaison, egg yolks beaten into a flour-thickened stock sauce off the fire, which is often said to have been the usual way of enriching a white sauce before the widespread use of heavy cream in American kitchens. Serving vegetables on buttered toast squares appears often enough in the period to look like a familiar device, both to soak up the sauce and to turn a vegetable into a course substantial enough for luncheon or a meatless supper.