Home › Salads › Cauliflower Salad (Small cauliflower tablespoons)
Cauliflower Salad (Small cauliflower tablespoons)
1 small cauliflower 2 tablespoons lemon juice French dressing Lettuce 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Wash the cauliflower carefully; tie in a cloth and cook in boiling, salted water until thoroughly tender. When done remove the cloth; pour the lemon juice over the cauliflower and set it on the ice to cool. When ready to serve separate the flowerets; lay them on lettuce leaves; cover with French dressing and sprinkle parsley over the top.
A plain composed salad that depends almost entirely on how the cauliflower is cooked and chilled. Two details in the original — the cloth and the lemon juice — are doing more work than they appear to.
- The clothTying the head in cheesecloth keeps it whole and stops the curd from breaking up and clouding the water. A steamer basket or a snug pan does the same job; if you skip the cloth, lower the head stem-down into the water and lift it out with two spatulas.
- "Thoroughly tender" is too long"Thoroughly tender" is longer than modern taste wants -- cookbooks of the period commonly gave cauliflower twenty minutes or more, which is where the sulphurous smell and the waterlogged head that collapses under dressing come from. A small whole head will usually be done in about 10-15 minutes in well-salted boiling water — a knife should meet slight resistance at the stem.
- Lemon juice on the hot headPour it while the cauliflower is still hot so it is absorbed rather than running off. This is the seasoning step, not a garnish; without it the salad tastes flat under the vinaigrette.
- "Set it on the ice"An icebox instruction. Refrigerate uncovered for an hour, or drop the drained head into ice water for a minute and then chill — the point is to stop the carryover cooking that turns the florets to mush.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar or lemon, with salt and pepper — not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Dress at the tableCauliflower weeps once acid sits on it. Separate the florets and spoon the dressing over just before serving, or the lettuce underneath will be limp by the time the plate arrives.
- YieldA small head serves about four as a side salad.
Cauliflower was long served in America as a hot boiled vegetable under white sauce, and treating it cold as a salad component fits a broader early-twentieth-century interest in cooked vegetables dressed and chilled — beets, string beans, asparagus and cauliflower all appear this way in salad chapters of the period. The bed of lettuce, the vinaigrette poured over at the last moment and the parsley scattered on top follow the standard salad formula of the era closely; what varies from book to book is largely the vegetable in the middle.