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Cauliflower Polonaise
1 head cauliflower 1½ teaspoons mustard 1¼ teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon powdered sugar 1/2 teaspoon paprika Yolks of 3 eggs 1/4 cup olive oil 1/2 cup vinegar 2 tablespoons melted butter 1 teaspoon chopped parsley Cook the cauliflower as usual; when done break into flowerets and cover with a sauce made from the other ingredients. Mix the dry ingredients; add the beaten eggs, then the oil and vinegar. Cook over hot water until the mixture thickens; remove from fire and add the butter and parsley.
A boiled dressing rather than a true hollandaise, and it lives or dies on gentle heat. Everything else here is straightforward.
- The hinge: keep the water below a boilYolks thickened with vinegar will curdle fast if the double-boiler water is at a rolling boil. Hold the water at a bare simmer, stir constantly, and pull the sauce at about 165-170F, when it coats a spoon.
- "Mustard" means dry mustard powderA 1900s recipe listing mustard by the teaspoon among the dry ingredients means English-style ground mustard, not a prepared jarred condiment. Colman's or any plain mustard powder is the equivalent.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period this usually means finely granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. One teaspoon of granulated sugar is the safer reading, and it dissolves cleanly into the yolks.
- The vinegar is assertiveHalf a cup of vinegar to a quarter cup of oil is a sharp ratio by current taste, and the strength of household vinegar at the time is not something we can assume matched today's standard 5 percent. Taste as it thickens and cut it with a spoonful or two of water or cream if it bites.
- Cooking the cauliflower "as usual"Long boiling of a whole head was common in books of this sort, and it gives grey, sulphurous florets. Break the head into florets first and boil or steam 6 to 9 minutes, until a knife tip meets slight resistance, then drain well so the sauce is not thinned by water.
- Add the butter off the heatThe two tablespoons of melted butter and the parsley go in after the pan leaves the stove, as written. Stirring butter into an already-set yolk sauce over heat is what breaks it.
- Yield and servingOne medium head serves four as a side dish, and the sauce makes roughly a cup. It is good warm rather than hot, and any left over keeps a couple of days refrigerated, though it will not reheat without splitting.
Polonaise is French kitchen shorthand for "in the Polish style," and in classical usage it means a vegetable, most often cauliflower or asparagus, finished with browned butter, toasted breadcrumbs and sieved hard-boiled egg. This version keeps the egg and the butter but reworks them into a cooked vinegar-and-yolk dressing, the sort of boiled dressing that filled American cookbooks in the decades when mayonnaise was, by some accounts, still regarded as a fussy and unreliable thing to attempt at home. Boiled dressings were the household answer: the yolks are cooked, the acid is generous, and the result keeps for days in a cold pantry. That a domestic-science book of this period would attach a grand French name to it says a good deal about how American cooking of the 1910s borrowed continental vocabulary while quietly substituting technique that suited a home kitchen and an icebox.