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Cauliflower à la Hollandaise
Prepare as for Creamed Cauliflower, using Hollandaise Sauce I instead of White Sauce.
A one-line recipe that assumes you have two other pages of the book open. Everything that matters is in what it points to: the boiling of the cauliflower and the emulsion poured over it.
- Cook the cauliflower far lessTurn-of-the-century directions typically boil a whole head 20 to 30 minutes, which leaves it grey and sulphurous. A trimmed head broken into large flowerets needs 6 to 10 minutes in well-salted water, until a knife tip meets slight resistance. Drain it thoroughly and let it steam dry, or the sauce will slide off into a pool.
- The soakThe older method sets the head stem-up in cold water for half an hour or so before cooking to drive out insects. With supermarket cauliflower this is unnecessary; with a farm or garden head it is still the quickest way to clear the crevices.
- Hollandaise I in this bookFannie Farmer's first hollandaise is the hot-water emulsion: butter creamed, egg yolks and lemon juice beaten in, then boiling water added and the whole cooked over hot water until it thickens. It is not the blender version; the book sets the bowl in boiling water, though gentler heat gives more margin.
- The hingeHeat is the usual cause of failure. If the yolks go much past about 180-185F they scramble and the emulsion breaks. Pull the pan off the heat the moment it coats a spoon, and beat in a spoonful of cold water at the first sign of graininess.
- CayenneThe period sauce is seasoned with salt and a few grains of cayenne rather than white pepper. Keep it small: it should sharpen the lemon, not read as heat.
- Assembly and timingHollandaise will not wait long and will not reheat. Make it while the cauliflower boils, hold it over warm (not hot) water for a few minutes at most, and sauce the vegetable at the table.
- YieldOne medium head, about 2 lb before trimming, with roughly a cup of sauce should serve four as a side dish; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Cauliflower dressed with a butter-and-egg sauce runs through nineteenth-century English and American cookery, and the name hollandaise — "in the Dutch manner" — is generally traced to French kitchens borrowing a reputation for butter and eggs from the Low Countries rather than to any Dutch dish in particular. What is characteristic of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is not the dish but the bookkeeping: Farmer numbered her sauces and cross-referenced them, so a single line could redirect a familiar preparation onto a richer footing. That system was part of the school's larger project of teaching cookery as a set of standardised, repeatable components, the same impulse that gave the book its level measurements. In a vegetable chapter otherwise heavy with white sauce, hollandaise stands out as the richer option.