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Dressed Cauliflower
Simmer a cauliflower till it is tender. Pour out the liquor, and add to it a bit of butter, the size of a nut, rolled in flour, a pinch of nutmeg, a table-spoonful of Gruyere cheese and a little milk. Bind the sauce with a little feculina flour. At the moment of serving, pour the sauce over the cauliflower, which you have placed upright on a dish. The nutmeg and the cheese are indispensable to this dish.
Brussels Sprouts (The best way to cook them) Having cleaned and trimmed your sprouts, let them simmer in salted water, to which you have also added a little soda to preserve the color. Or, if you do not like to add soda, keep the pan firmly covered by the lid. When tender, take them out and let them drain, place them in another pan with a good lump of butter or fat; stir, so as to let the butter melt at once, and sprinkle in pepper and a tiny pinch of nutmeg.
Two vegetable dishes in one entry, both leaning on butter, nutmeg and restraint. The cauliflower is served whole and upright, so the sauce needs to be thick enough to cling.
- "Pour out the liquor" means keep itThe cooking water is the base of the sauce, not waste. Drain the cauliflower over a bowl and reduce a cup or so of that liquid before enriching it.
- Butter the size of a nutMost likely a walnut, the commonest sense of the phrase in period cookery, so roughly a tablespoon (about 15 g). Rolled in flour it becomes a beurre manie, whisked into the hot liquid off the boil.
- FeculinaA fine starch flour of the period; fecule is simply the French word for starch, and potato starch is the likely basis. Cornstarch or potato starch works; use a teaspoon slaked in cold water, and note that the recipe already thickens with the floured butter, so the starch is a finishing adjustment only.
- A tablespoon of GruyèreA tablespoon of Gruyere -- Grated, and less than it sounds once melted into the sauce. The recipe is right that it is indispensable, but Gruyere breaks if boiled hard; add it off the heat and stir until smooth.
- Cooking the cauliflower wholeTo stand it upright on the dish it must stay intact, which means a gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil, stem side down, 15 to 20 minutes for a medium head until a knife meets the core with slight resistance. Boiled to collapse it cannot be plated as described.
- The soda in the sproutsBicarbonate holds the green by keeping the water alkaline, but it destroys vitamin C and softens the cell walls to mush. The alternative the author offers is the better one, and better still is a large pan of well-salted water at a fast boil, uncovered, 6 to 8 minutes.
- NutmegGrate it fresh in both dishes. Pre-ground nutmeg loses the volatile oils that make it register against butter and cheese.
- YieldOne medium cauliflower serves three or four as a side; reckon 150 g of sprouts per person.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the invasion of 1914, and it was published in aid of Belgian relief. That origin shows in dishes like this one: household cooking, cheap ingredients, and instructions that assume the cook already knows what she is doing. The combination of cauliflower, butter, nutmeg and a hard mountain cheese is the standard vocabulary of Franco-Belgian vegetable cookery, close kin to the older sauce Mornay. The insistence that the nutmeg and cheese are indispensable might be read as a refugee's correction of an English kitchen that would have boiled the cauliflower plain. Brussels sprouts carry the city's name because they were grown intensively in market gardens around Brussels by the eighteenth century, though the claim of a medieval origin there is traditional rather than documented.