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Spanish Cauliflower
1 tablespoon shortening 2 small onions, minced 1 bunch parsley, minced 1 stalk celery, minced 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup boiling water 1 head cauliflower 3 tablespoons tomato catsup Fry onions, parsley and celery in shortening, blend with flour, add boiling water and cook 30 minutes, then add catsup. Clean cauliflower and boil 30 minutes. Drain and turn into baking pan. Cover with sauce and put into oven for 5 minutes. Serve hot. Serves 6.
A plain vegetable course from a Depression-era menu book, where the interest is a cooked catsup sauce rather than cheese. Two of the timings need rethinking.
- Cut the cauliflower time hardThirty minutes of boiling reduces a whole head to grey mush and drives off the sulphur compounds as a smell through the house. Break the head into florets and boil or steam 6-9 minutes, until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain well so the sauce is not thinned.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Five minutes only makes sense in a hot oven: 400-425F, and its purpose is to marry the sauce and the surface, not to cook anything further. If the cauliflower and sauce are both hot when assembled, you can skip the oven entirely.
- ShorteningIn this period that means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat sold in a tin. A tablespoon of butter or olive oil does the same job and tastes better with the celery and onion.
- One bunch of parsleyRead this as a modest handful, roughly 3-4 tablespoons minced, stems included since they are being fried. A full supermarket bunch minced into a one-cup sauce would overwhelm it.
- The sauce will reduceOne cup of water simmered 30 minutes with a tablespoon of flour will lose a good deal of volume and can end up much thicker than a pourable sauce. Simmer partly covered and add water back as needed, or shorten the simmer to about 15 minutes, which is enough to soften the celery and lose the raw flour taste.
- Catsup then and nowBottled catsup recipes varied, and modern ketchup is generally sweeter than many earlier commercial versions, so taste before adding the third tablespoon and correct with a little vinegar, salt and pepper -- the recipe seasons nothing at all.
- ServingSix as a side dish, not a main. A shallow gratin dish rather than a deep baking pan keeps the sauce in contact with the florets.
Books of this kind were built around cheap bulk vegetables and a small cast of pantry flavourings, and bottled catsup did a great deal of work as an all-purpose seasoning -- a shortcut to tomato flavour in households that would not open a can for a single cup of sauce. The Spanish label attached loosely to almost any dish with onion, tomato and sometimes green pepper in American cookbooks of the period, and rarely indicated anything actually cooked in Spain. Cauliflower was a familiar market vegetable by then, but commonly appeared boiled and buttered or under a white sauce; dressing it with a cooked vegetable-and-tomato sauce and giving it a brief pass through the oven was the kind of small variation such collections used to keep the same few vegetables from repeating too obviously.