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Cauliflower
Cut stalk close to flower, remove green leaves and soak in cold salted water one hour. Cook in cheese cloth bag thirty to forty minutes. Remove from bag and serve with Hollandaise or white sauce, or scalloped with white sauce and crumbs.
A terse turn-of-the-century method for a whole head of cauliflower. Almost everything here still works except the cooking time, which belongs to an era that liked its vegetables collapsed.
- Cut the time by two thirdsThirty to forty minutes turns a head grey, sulfurous and waterlogged. A whole trimmed head needs 10 to 15 minutes in boiling salted water, until a knife slips into the core with slight resistance; separated florets need 5 to 6. Test early and often.
- The cheesecloth bagIt was there to keep a whole head from breaking up in the rolling water and to let you lift it out intact. A wide pan and a spider or two slotted spoons do the same job; if you do use cloth, tie it loosely so water circulates.
- The salt soakAn hour in cold salted water was standard insurance against insects hiding in the curd, when cauliflower came from a market garden rather than shrink-wrap. Twenty minutes is plenty now, and you can skip it for supermarket heads.
- Keeping it whiteCook uncovered, and add a squeeze of lemon or a splash of milk to the water. Long covered boiling is what produces the strong cabbage smell and the dull ivory colour.
- Scalloped, in numbersFor the scalloped version: drained florets in a buttered dish, about 1 1/2 cups white sauce, buttered crumbs on top, 400F for 20 minutes until browned and bubbling. Undercook the cauliflower slightly since it keeps cooking in the oven.
- White sauce proportionsThe recipe leaves them unstated. The usual medium white sauce of the period, 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, salt and pepper, gives a sauce that coats the florets rather than pooling.
- YieldOne average head, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 pounds once trimmed, serves about four as a side dish.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it works as a general household manual with the firm's cocoa threaded through the sweet chapters. Entries like this one are deliberately compressed, written for cooks who already knew how to make a white sauce and only needed the outline. Cauliflower itself is a cultivated form of Brassica oleracea, the same species as cabbage and broccoli; it reached English and then American kitchens as a comparatively genteel vegetable, and the standard nineteenth-century treatment — boiled whole, then masked with a butter or egg sauce — is exactly what appears here. The choice of Hollandaise as an alternative marks the period's steady absorption of French sauce vocabulary into ordinary American cookbooks.