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Cauliflower Salad
One Cauliflower, a French or mayonnaise dressing, pickled beets. Remove the outer leaves, and soak in cold water, slightly salted, for an hour or more. Cook it with the stalk downward in the kettle of salted boiling water until tender, allowing one-half hour for cooking. Drain carefully, and when cold serve with a French or mayonnaise dressing. Pickled beets are a pretty garnish for this salad, contrasting well with the white cauliflower and yellow dressing.
A straightforward composed salad whose only real problem is the cooking time. Everything else translates directly.
- Half an hour is far too longA whole head boiled thirty minutes collapses into grey mush and turns sulphurous. A medium head cooked stalk-down in salted boiling water is tender at 10 to 15 minutes; test the thickest part of the stem with a knife tip. Florets alone need 5 to 6.
- Stop the cookingThe book says drain and cool, but a head left to cool in its own heat keeps cooking. Drain and spread it out, or plunge into ice water and drain thoroughly — waterlogged cauliflower dilutes the dressing.
- The salted soakAn hour in cold salted water was commonly directed in period cookbooks to drive out insects hidden in the curd. Supermarket cauliflower rarely needs it; 20 minutes is ample if you want the insurance, and skipping it costs nothing.
- "Kettle" hereA large pot, not a tea kettle. Use one wide enough to hold the head upright without wedging it, and enough water to cover.
- French dressing of the periodOil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to order — commonly around three parts oil to one of vinegar, though period recipes vary and some include mustard. Mayonnaise of the same era was made fresh and thicker than jarred; loosen it with a spoonful of vinegar or cream so it coats rather than clumps.
- The beet garnishPickled beets bleed pink into anything they touch. Cut them and drain on paper towel, then arrange them at the last moment around the base rather than over the curd.
- YieldA medium head serves four as a salad course. Dress it just before serving; cauliflower goes soft and weeps if it sits dressed.
Cauliflower was a genteel vegetable in nineteenth-century American cooking — more expensive than cabbage, sold by the head, and often treated as something to be shown off whole rather than cut up. The instruction to cook it stalk downward is a matter of heat transfer: the dense stem sits in the hottest water and cooks through with the curd. The head is kept intact, and served with a dressing. Salad books of this period appeared as the salad course worked its way into middle-class American dinners in the last decades of the century. The attention to colour here — white curd, yellow dressing, red beets — is characteristic; late-Victorian salad writing treats arrangement as half the recipe, and pickled beets supplied red on a winter table.