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Cauliflower Salad
1 head cauliflower Lettuce Cream dressing Remove the green leaves from the cauliflower and place it head down in cold water to which has been added one tablespoonful of salt to one quart of water. Soak one-half hour or more to drive out any insects that may have found their way into the flowerets. Cut into small sections or flowerets. Cook in boiling, salted water until tender. Drain, cool and serve on individual salad plates with a garnish of lettuce. Arrange one or two flowerets upon the plate, and serve with a spoonful of dressing at the side and on top of it.
A plain composed salad whose only difficulty is not overcooking the cauliflower. Two details in the original need translating: the salt soak and the undefined "cream dressing."
- The hinge: cook it just tenderFlorets need roughly 4-6 minutes in boiling salted water, tested with a knife tip at the stem end. Older instructions to cook "until tender" often meant fifteen minutes or more, which gives grey, sulphurous cauliflower that collapses on the plate.
- Cool it properlyDrain and spread the florets on a tray, or shock them in ice water, then drain again thoroughly. Cauliflower left to cool in its own steam in a colander keeps cooking and turns watery, which thins the dressing on the plate.
- The salt soakOne tablespoon salt per quart of cold water for half an hour was standard insurance against insects hiding in the curd. With commercially grown heads it is optional, though it does no harm; a good rinse and a look between the florets is usually enough.
- "Cream dressing"In books of this period the term usually points to a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and milk or cream and sharpened with vinegar and mustard, though some books use it for an uncooked cream-and-vinegar mixture; in neither case is it whipped cream. A mayonnaise thinned with a little cream, or a mustardy vinaigrette, sits well here.
- Serving temperatureServe cool but not straight from the refrigerator; cold dulls the nutty flavour of the cauliflower. Dress at the last moment so the lettuce garnish stays crisp.
Cauliflower reached English and American tables as a garden luxury and was long treated as a vegetable to be boiled and sauced rather than eaten raw, which is why even a salad recipe here begins with a pot of boiling water. The half-hour salt soak is a reminder of how much produce arrived from the garden rather than a packing house, and the "cream dressing" points to an era when a cooked egg-and-milk dressing was a household standby.