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Cauliflower Soup No. 2
1 cauliflower about one pound 2 pints barley stock 2 ounce butter 1 ounce flour 1 1/2 pints milk Salt and pepper Grated cheese if desired Prepare the cauliflower, and cut it into small pieces; cook in boiling water for five minutes; strain. Put the cauliflower into a saucepan with the barley stock, which should be boiling. Cook until tender; ten rub through a sieve. Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, add the milk and cauliflower puree, stirring all the time until it boils. Cook for five minutes. Add the seasoning of pepper and salt and cheese.
A straightforward white cauliflower soup built on barley water rather than meat stock, which is the whole point of it in a meatless book. The one thing to watch is the finish: once the milk and puree go in, keep the heat gentle and stir, or the base scorches and the soup takes on a burnt-milk flavour nothing will hide.
- Barley stockNot a commercial product but the strained liquid from simmering pearl barley in water; the recipe does not say how it is made, and versions elsewhere vary in strength and in whether aromatics are added. The result is faintly starchy and slightly sweet; a light vegetable stock is the nearest substitute, though the soup will be thinner.
- PintsIf your copy is a British printing, a pint is 20 fluid ounces, so 2 pints of stock is 5 cups and 1 1/2 pints of milk is just under 4 cups. An American pint gives 4 cups and 3 cups. Either reading works; the soup is simply looser or thicker.
- The five-minute blanchThe initial boil-and-drain removes the sulphurous edge from the cauliflower and any grit or insects from the head. It is worth doing even though the vegetable is cooked again afterwards.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender or stick blender does this in seconds and gives a smoother result. Sieve afterwards only if you want it velvety; cauliflower purees well and rarely needs it.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together a minute before adding liquid so the soup does not taste pasty. Add the milk gradually off the heat, then return to a simmer, then stir in the puree.
- CheeseAdd it at the end, off the boil, and let it melt in. A hard grating cheese such as Parmesan or a dry Cheddar suits it, though the recipe specifies nothing beyond 'grated cheese'; boiling cheese into the soup makes it stringy and greasy.
- SeasoningWhite pepper keeps the soup pale, and it needs more salt than you expect because barley stock brings almost none. Nutmeg is often grated into milk-based sauces of this kind, though this recipe does not call for it.
- YieldAbout 3 1/2 pints of finished soup, or six generous first-course servings.
Cauliflower soup thickened with a butter-and-flour roux and finished with milk is a straight application of the French white sauce that ran through English and American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward — the same technique as a cream of celery or cream of onion, with the vegetable changed. What marks this version as belonging to a meatless book is the barley stock. Cooks trained on beef and veal broth needed something to stand in its place, and grain water is often said to have served: cheap, faintly savoury, and slightly thickening on its own. Books of this kind multiplied in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century, driven partly by vegetarian and temperance-adjacent reform movements and partly, during the First World War, by official campaigns urging households to spare meat.