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Asparagus-and-Cauliflower Salad
Break the cooked cauliflower into its flowerets, dispose in the centre of the serving-dish and surround with a wreath of cooked asparagus tips. Pour over the whole a mayonnaise, a boiled or a cream dressing, and sprinkle with chopped capers or pimentos.
A composed salad rather than a tossed one, and it stands or falls on how the vegetables are cooked and cooled. The book assumes you already have cauliflower and asparagus boiled from an earlier meal.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyCauliflower wants 5-7 minutes in well-salted boiling water until a knife meets slight resistance; asparagus tips need 2-3. Both should be drained and spread out to cool, not piled in a bowl, or residual heat turns them grey and slack.
- Cold, and dryThe hinge of the dish. Any water clinging to the florets will thin the mayonnaise and pool on the plate. Pat everything dry and chill before dressing, and dress only at the moment of serving.
- "Boiled dressing"Not a dressing that is boiled, but the period's cooked custard-style dressing: egg yolk, mustard, vinegar, sugar and milk or cream thickened over hot water. It is tarter and lighter than mayonnaise and was standard in American households before commercial mayonnaise was common.
- "Cream dressing"In period usage this generally means heavy cream beaten with lemon juice or vinegar and seasoning, sometimes folded into mayonnaise; the recipe itself does not define it. It sets up thicker than you expect once the acid hits the cream.
- PimentosThe canned or jarred sweet red pepper, not a chilli. Drain, blot and chop fine; the packing liquid will bleed pink across a white dressing.
- CapersRinse brined capers and chop them, or the salt lands unevenly. Salt-packed ones need a soak of ten minutes and a rinse.
- AssemblyBuild on the plate the guest will see it on, since the wreath of tips cannot be moved once dressed. A shallow round dish suits it better than a bowl.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no quantities. As a working estimate, a medium head of cauliflower and a pound of asparagus with about a cup of mayonnaise will serve six as a salad course.
Salads of this kind belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian fashion for the "composed" salad, arranged in patterns on a flat dish rather than tossed, and judged as much by its appearance as its flavour. Cauliflower and asparagus were both comparatively costly vegetables in that period, asparagus especially so, since a short season and careful cultivation kept it expensive, and canned tips appear as a substitute in some books of this sort. The three dressings offered here suggest the range available to a well-provisioned household of the period: mayonnaise for the most formal table, boiled dressing as a thriftier alternative made from pantry staples, and a cream dressing in between. Capers and pimentos appear as garnish because both kept well in the jar and supplied colour against a white plate.