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Cauliflower Soup
After you have boiled a cauliflower, it is a great extravagance to throw away the liquor; it is delicately flavored and forms the basis of a good soup. Wash well your cauliflower, taking great care to remove all grit and insects. Place it to simmer with its head downwards, in salted water; and, when it is tender, remove it. Now for the soup. Let all the outer leaves and odd bits simmer well, then pass them through a sieve. Fry some chopped onions, add the liquor of the cauliflower and the pieces that have been rubbed through the sieve, add a little white pepper and a slice of brown bread. Let all cook gently for half-an-hour, then, just before serving it, take out the slice of bread and sprinkle in two teaspoonfuls of grated Gruyere cheese.
A frugal second-day soup built on the water a cauliflower was cooked in. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a method and scale to one medium head.
- Working quantitiesThe original gives none. As a starting point: one medium cauliflower with its leaves, the water it was boiled in, a chopped onion or two (the recipe says "onions"), a thick slice of brown bread and the 2 teaspoonfuls of grated Gruyere the recipe specifies. The volume of liquor and the number of servings are a modern guess, not in the text.
- Head downwardsSimmering with the head down keeps the florets under the water and helps stop the delicate curd breaking up. Salt the water properly, since the same water becomes the soup.
- Grit and insectsA modern head is cleaner than a 1915 market one, but the advice still holds for a whole cauliflower with leaves attached. Twenty minutes in cold salted water, florets down, dislodges anything lodged in the curd.
- The leaves are the soupThe leaves are used, not discarded -- the recipe builds the soup from the outer leaves and odd bits, so keep them. Simmer them until fully soft before sieving or they will not pass.
- Pass them through a sieveIn 1915 this meant working the softened leaves through a sieve by hand. A food mill, or a stick blender followed by a quick pass through a strainer, gives a similar smooth result with far less work.
- The bread is the thickenerThe bread -- the slice of brown bread simmers in the soup for half an hour and is then taken out, so whatever body it leaves comes only from what it sheds into the liquid. Use a firm loaf rather than soft sandwich bread, which will fall apart.
- Cheese at the end, off the heatTwo teaspoons of Gruyere is a seasoning, not a cheese soup. Sprinkle it in after the pan leaves the burner; boiled Gruyere turns stringy and separates into oil.
- White pepper on purposeWhite rather than black keeps the pale colour clean. It is sharper and slightly barnyard-y, so add it in small amounts and taste.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes sent by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and is often said to have been sold in aid of relief work; the whole collection carries an air of thrift that was both national temperament and wartime necessity. This entry opens not with an ingredient list but with a reproach about extravagance, which tells you as much about the moment as about the soup. Cauliflower is generally associated with Flemish market gardening, and the technique of building a second dish from the cooking liquor and the discarded outer leaves is often traced to Low Countries household cooking rather than to any single named dish. The pinch of Gruyere at the finish and the slice of brown bread simmered for body are both classic economies: flavour and thickening from what is already in the house.