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Cauliflower à la Huntington
Prepare cauliflower as for boiled cauliflower, and steam until soft. Separate in pieces and pour over the following sauce:
Mix one and one-half teaspoons mustard, one and onefourth teaspoons salt, one teaspoon powdered sugar, and one-fourth teaspoon paprika. Add yolks three eggs slightly beaten, one-fourth cup olive oil, and one-half cup vinegar in which one-half teaspoon finely chopped shallot has infused five minutes. Cook over hot water until mixture thickens. Remove from range, and add one-half tablespoon curry powder, two tablespoons melted butter, and one teaspoon finely chopped parsley.
A boiled dressing in the late-Victorian manner — egg yolks thickened over water, sharpened with vinegar and finished with curry — poured over hot cauliflower. The sauce is the whole dish, and it lives or dies on gentle heat.
- Keep the water below a simmerThe yolks will scramble if the bowl gets much above 180F. Use a bowl set over barely steaming water, stir constantly, and pull it off when it coats a spoon; it thickens further as it cools.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardIn this book mustard is generally the dry powdered sort rather than a prepared jar mustard. Mixing it dry with the salt, sugar and paprika before the liquids go in keeps it from clumping.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn this period the term meant finely ground granulated sugar, without the cornstarch of modern confectioners'. Ordinary granulated or superfine is the closer match.
- The acid is deliberateHalf a cup of vinegar to three yolks is a lot by modern eye, but the liquid dilutes the yolks and gives the sauce its bite. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than harsh distilled.
- Curry and butter go in off the heatAdding them after the pan leaves the range stops the sauce cooking further. Whisk the melted butter in a little at a time.
- Don't steam the cauliflower to collapseDirections of this sort commonly ran twenty minutes or more. Ten to twelve minutes for florets, until a knife meets slight resistance, gives something that holds its shape under the sauce.
- Shallot infusionFive minutes of the shallot standing in the vinegar is all the recipe asks; strain it out if you want a smooth sauce, or leave it in for texture.
- YieldOne medium head with this quantity of sauce should serve about four to six as a side. Leftover sauce will keep a day or two refrigerated, though the butter in it firms up when cold.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is full of dishes tagged "à la" someone — a habit borrowed from restaurant menus of the 1880s and 90s, when a proper name lent a plain vegetable an air of the dining room. The sauce itself belongs to a family the book returns to repeatedly: the cooked or "boiled" dressing, in which egg yolks, vinegar, dry mustard and a little sugar are thickened over hot water. The curry powder is the other period marker, used here as a finishing seasoning rather than as the basis of anything resembling an Indian dish.