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Cauliflower Salad
SOAK the cauliflower in salted water an hour; cook in boiling salted water until tender; drain and chill, then sprinkle with French dressing and set aside for half an hour. Sever the flowerets partly from the stalk, but so as not to change their relative positions, and place on a serving-dish; put heart leaves of lettuce between the flowerets and about the base of the vegetable; pour a cup of mayonnaise dressing over the whole, and sprinkle with pimentos or fine-chopped parsley. In serving, separate the flowerets with a sharp knife.
A whole-head presentation salad: the cauliflower is cooked intact, marinated, then carved just enough to look like a bouquet. The construction is the point, so everything depends on not overcooking.
- Cook it whole, and stop earlyThe head must hold together to be sliced part-way through, so boil it whole, stem-down, and start testing early; the recipe says only "until tender," and for a medium head that is likely to be in the region of a quarter of an hour. A knife should meet slight resistance at the core. Anything softer will collapse when you cut the flowerets apart.
- The hour-long salt soakSalted soaking was commonly recommended in cookbooks of the period to draw insects and grit out of tightly packed heads. With modern commercial cauliflower, 15 minutes in cool salted water is ample, and it does not hurt the texture.
- Chill before dressingDrain the head upside down so water trapped between the flowerets runs out, then chill thoroughly. Warm or wet cauliflower thins mayonnaise and it will slide off the head onto the dish.
- French dressing here means vinaigretteIn this period "French dressing" generally means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, whisked or shaken, without an emulsifier or sugar. The half-hour rest lets the cooked cauliflower absorb it; this is the step that seasons the vegetable itself, and skipping it leaves a bland interior under a dressed surface.
- A cup of mayonnaiseThat is 8 fl oz, enough to coat a head generously. A homemade mayonnaise contains raw egg; if that is a concern for anyone at the table, use a commercial jarred mayonnaise, which is made with pasteurized egg.
- PimentosCanned or jarred roasted red pimento peppers, drained and cut into fine strips or dice. Any jarred roasted red pepper works; the purpose is a line of red against the white.
- Yield and servingA medium head serves four to six as a first course or side. Cut the flowerets fully apart at the table with a sharp knife, as directed, and lift each with a wedge of the lettuce beneath it.
Composed vegetable salads built to be looked at before they were eaten were a hallmark of American cookery around 1900, and this book seems to belong to that general moment: the salad chapter of the era treats the serving dish as an arrangement, with lettuce hearts used as structure and color rather than as something anyone necessarily ate. Cauliflower suited the style because a boiled head keeps its architecture, and the trick of cutting the flowerets partly free so they fall open like petals fits neatly with that taste for arrangement. The two-stage dressing, a vinaigrette marinade followed by a mayonnaise coat, was also conventional then and remains sound reasoning: the thin dressing carries salt and acid into the vegetable, the thick one stays on the outside where it can be seen.