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Creamed Cauliflower
Make a cream sauce; add the boiled cauliflower, broken into pieces, and serve.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and how to boil a cauliflower. Both assumptions need filling in, and the second is where old cookbooks go wrong.
- What "cream sauce" means hereA medium white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until the flour loses its raw taste, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. No cream is required despite the name, though a few tablespoons in place of some milk improves it.
- The hinge: do not overboil the cauliflowerMany cookbooks of the period called for twenty or thirty minutes, which turns the head grey, sulphurous and waterlogged; this recipe gives no time at all. Florets need 5 to 8 minutes in well-salted boiling water, until a knife meets slight resistance. Drain thoroughly, or the sauce will thin out on the plate.
- Break it up before, not afterThe wording ('the boiled cauliflower, broken into pieces') implies the head was boiled first and broken afterwards. Cutting into florets first cooks them evenly and faster; if you want the whole head for presentation, add 10 to 15 minutes and expect the stem end to lag.
- Drain hardCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in its crevices. Let it sit in the colander a minute or two, or blot it, before it meets the sauce.
- Proportions and yieldOne medium head, roughly 1½ lb trimmed, takes about 1½ cups of sauce and serves four as a side dish.
- Obvious extensions the book leaves unsaidStirring ½ cup grated sharp cheese into the finished sauce gives cauliflower cheese; topped with buttered crumbs and browned at 400F for 10 minutes it becomes the baked version. Neither is in the text, and the book gives no oven temperature.
Cauliflower under a white sauce is one of the small fixed points of Anglo-American cookery, appearing in English household books through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and passing intact into American ones. Its brevity here fits the loose-leaf format, and a cream sauce recipe would ordinarily be given its own entry elsewhere rather than repeated here. The terseness also reflects how far the white sauce dominated vegetable cookery of the period — boiled vegetable plus butter-flour-milk was a common treatment for cauliflower, celery, onions, carrots and peas alike, a habit that lasted in home kitchens until vegetables began to be served closer to their own flavor.