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Cauliflower Salad
Marinate one cup cold boiled cauliflower with a French dressing. Drain, add boiled dressing. Chill. Serve on bed of water cress and sprinkle with grated Edam cheese.
A four-line salad that assumes you already have two dressings in the icebox, which is the only real obstacle. Everything else is straightforward.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn this period it is simply oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar though the proportion varies from source to source — not the sweetened orange bottled product sold under that name today.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard, a little sugar and flour or butter, thickened over water and cooled. It predates jarred mayonnaise in American kitchens and is tangier and thinner. Mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cider vinegar is the closest substitute.
- Cook the cauliflower short"Cold boiled cauliflower" in 1907 often meant twenty minutes or more. Six to eight minutes in salted water, then straight into cold water, keeps the florets firm enough to hold their shape through two dressings.
- Marinating timeThe recipe gives none. Thirty minutes to an hour in the vinaigrette at room temperature is enough for the cauliflower to take up flavor; longer and it turns limp and sour.
- Drain properlyThe hinge of the dish. Any vinaigrette left clinging will thin the boiled dressing into a puddle on the plate. Drain in a sieve and blot the florets before dressing them again.
- EdamA firm, mild Dutch cheese in a red wax rind, still sold. Grate it fine on a rasp; coarse shreds sit on top rather than seasoning the salad. Aged Gouda works if Edam is scarce.
- YieldOne cup of cauliflower makes two small side salads. Scale up by the cup if serving four or more.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of many cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product into home kitchens, though the salad chapter has nothing to do with chocolate. The double-dressing method here is one approach among others in this period: a vinaigrette to penetrate and season a bland cooked vegetable, then a thick cooked dressing to coat it, at a time when boiled dressing was still the standard American salad sauce and commercial mayonnaise was barely on the market. Cauliflower served cold under dressing was a familiar enough idea; the watercress bed and grated Edam are the touches that mark it as a turn-of-the-century composed salad, meant to look deliberate on the plate rather than thrifty.