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Savory Cauliflower
1 cauliflower 2 ounces butter Small bunch sweet herbs 1 onion, carrot and a little sliced celery 1 tablespoon flour Fry the onion, carrot, celery and herbs all together in the butter. When nicely browned, shake in the flour, pour on a pint of boiling water, stirring it well all the time, and let it cook gently for half an hour; then pass it through a hair sieve. Boil the cauliflower separately until well cooked, drain it, and pour the above sauce over. Put in the oven a few minutes, and serve very hot.
A brown vegetable sauce built on a mirepoix, poured over boiled cauliflower — the meatless answer to a roast with gravy. A few conversions and one technique note will get it right.
- Quantities2 ounces butter is 4 tablespoons; a pint of boiling water is 2 cups (the recipe is British-influenced, so an imperial pint of 20 fl oz is possible, but 2 cups gives a sauce of the right consistency with 1 tablespoon flour). Serves 4 as a side, 2 as a main.
- Sweet herbsThe period shorthand for the soft kitchen herbs — parsley, thyme, marjoram, savory, with a bay leaf. A small bundle tied with string is easiest to fish out, though here everything is sieved anyway.
- Brown the vegetables properlyThis is the hinge. The sauce takes all its colour and depth from the onion, carrot and celery caught to a genuine deep brown in the butter, not merely softened. Pale vegetables give a thin, floury gravy with nothing behind it.
- The flourOne tablespoon to a pint is a very loose sauce by modern habit. Let it reduce over the half hour rather than adding more flour, or use two tablespoons if you want it to coat.
- Passing through a hair sieveA horsehair sieve was the fine strainer of the period. A fine mesh sieve does the same job; press hard on the vegetables to push the pulp through, which is where the body comes from. A blender then a strainer works as well.
- Don't overboil the cauliflower"Well cooked" in older books tends to mean softer than modern taste prefers. Boil or steam florets 6–8 minutes, or a whole head 12–15, until a knife meets slight resistance. It gets a few more minutes in the oven afterwards.
- The oven stageNo temperature is given. A hot oven, 400–425F, for 5 minutes is enough to glaze the top and bring everything to serving heat; the dish is not meant to bake.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified. Salt the sauce after sieving and season the cauliflower water generously.
Meatless cookery leaned on this trick: take a dish whose appeal lies in its gravy, and build the gravy from browned root vegetables instead of bones. The base here is onion, carrot and celery browned in fat and thickened with flour — the same broad approach as a brown sauce, but without the meat stock — and it delivers the savoury, faintly sweet depth the title promises. Cauliflower was a natural carrier for it; boiled whole and sauced, it held the centre of a plate the way a joint would.