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Creamed Cauliflower
1 medium-sized head of cauliflower 1 cup white sauce Prepare and cook the cauliflower as for buttered cauliflower. Prepare one cup of white sauce, using for the liquid milk only. Separate flowerets, and mix the cauliflower with the sauce. Cook about five minutes or until the cauliflower thoroughly seasoned with the sauce.
A skeleton recipe that assumes you already know the book's buttered cauliflower and its standard white sauce. Both are worth pinning down before you start.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce of this era is generally 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. "Using for the liquid milk only" rules out the common practice of substituting part of the vegetable cooking water, which would thin the flavour here.
- Cooking the cauliflower"As for buttered cauliflower" presumably means boiled in salted water until tender. Modern practice is 6-8 minutes for florets, 12-15 for a whole head; older books often gave much longer times, and the result is grey and sulphurous. Stop while the stems still have some resistance, since the florets get another five minutes in the sauce.
- Break the head before boilingThe order of the instructions implies the head is cooked whole and the flowerets separated afterwards. Cutting into florets first cooks faster and more evenly, and there is little advantage to the whole head once it is going to be broken up anyway.
- Drain thoroughlyCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in its crevices. Drain it well and let it steam dry for a minute, or the sauce will loosen into milk in the pan.
- SeasoningThe original relies entirely on the sauce for seasoning, and a plain flour-and-milk sauce needs help: salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of grated cheese stirred in off the heat.
- The five minutesKeep the heat low and fold rather than stir. The point is to warm the florets through and let them take up the sauce, not to cook them further; a hard simmer will break them into mush and can scorch the milk sauce on the bottom of the pan.
- YieldA medium head with one cup of sauce serves four as a side dish, or two as a light main course.
Meatless cookbooks leaned heavily on white sauce, and this recipe shows why: milk, butter and flour gave body to a plate without meat, and the sauce made a watery vegetable substantial enough to sit at the centre of a meal. The pattern is straight out of the domestic-science tradition that ran through American cooking schools from the 1880s onward, in which a small set of graded sauces -- thin, medium, thick -- were taught as formulas to be applied to whatever vegetable was in season. Books of this kind multiplied during the First World War, when meatless days were a matter of public campaign as well as economy, which is why so many of them present vegetables not as accompaniments but as replacements.