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Cauliflower (Remove outside leaves)
Remove outside leaves from cauliflower and place it in cold water; allow to remain a half hour. Place in kettle and cover with boiling water; add one teaspoon of salt and boil slowly five minutes; place in cooker for one hour. Drain and serve with cream sauce.
A fireless-cooker recipe: the food is brought to the boil on the stove, then transferred to an insulated box to finish on stored heat. Everything about the timing follows from that.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated chest, packed with hay, felt or asbestos, that holds a hot pot near boiling for an hour or more with no fuel. The nearest modern equivalents are a vacuum flask cooker or a heavy Dutch oven wrapped in towels inside a cooler; a slow cooker on low is close in spirit but supplies heat rather than merely holding it.
- The hinge: the pot must go in scaldingRetained-heat cooking only works if the vessel and its contents start at a full boil and the lid is not lifted. Any delay between stove and box, or a peek partway through, and the cauliflower simply sits in water too cool to cook it.
- The cold-water soakThe half hour in cold water was standard practice to drive out insects lodged in the curd; some cooks salted the water for the same purpose. With supermarket cauliflower it is unnecessary, though a soak does freshen a head that has been in the refrigerator a few days.
- One hour is a very soft cauliflowerBy current taste, cauliflower florets want 5 to 8 minutes in boiling water and a whole head 12 to 15. An hour at declining heat produces something closer to a puree in shape, sweet but collapsing, and strongly sulfurous. That softness was the period expectation; it is not what most cooks want now.
- Whole head or floretsThe recipe assumes a whole trimmed head. Cutting into florets first shortens everything considerably and makes the fireless method largely pointless.
- Cream sauceThe period default is a medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, salt and a little white pepper, cooked until it coats a spoon. Some of the cauliflower cooking water can replace part of the milk.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a single head of the usual size serves about four as a side dish.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American kitchens between roughly 1905 and 1920, and this cookbook carries a section on it. The technique is older than the appliance and is usually traced to the Norwegian hay box, in which a pot was buried in insulating material to finish cooking off the fire; commercial versions with cork or mineral-wool linings were sold widely in the United States, and plans for homemade ones circulated in farm journals and extension bulletins. The appeal was fuel: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and tended for every hour of simmering, and a box that finished the vegetables while the fire went out saved both money and a hot kitchen in summer. Food-conservation campaigns during the First World War gave the method a second push. Vegetables, dried beans and tough cuts of meat were its natural subjects.