Home › Fish And Meat Sauces › Cauliflower Sauce
Cauliflower Sauce
1/4 cup butter Cooked flowerets from a small 1/4 cup flour cauliflower 1 cup White Stock III
This is a velouté — a butter-and-flour roux slackened with white stock — carried by cooked cauliflower florets. Equal parts butter and flour to one cup of liquid gives a distinctly thick sauce, closer to a binding sauce for a fish loaf or a boiled fowl than a pouring sauce.
- White Stock IIIThe white stocks in this book are unbrowned and unthickened, typically built on veal and/or fowl rather than beef. A good low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour the sauce is named for.
- Cook the roux, brieflyMelt the butter, stir in the flour and let it bubble a minute or two without colouring before the stock goes in. Skipping this leaves a raw, pasty taste that the mild stock will not hide.
- ThicknessA quarter cup each of butter and flour to a single cup of stock is roughly double the usual sauce proportion. If you want it to coat rather than cling, take the stock to a cup and a half or two cups and adjust from there.
- The cauliflowerBoil or steam the florets separately until just tender, drain them well, and fold them in at the end. Left to simmer in the sauce they collapse and turn sulphurous.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is listed here; season after the stock has thickened, since reduction concentrates whatever salt the stock carries.
- Yield and servingThe sauce base alone comes to somewhat over a cup; the flowerets from a small cauliflower will add considerably to that. A sauce of this kind suits boiled or baked white fish, boiled fowl, or toast.
The sauce chapter of a cooking-school text is organised the way a syllabus is: a handful of mother sauces, then a long tail of variations made by adding one ingredient to a base. Cauliflower sauce belongs to that tail — a white sauce built on veal or chicken stock rather than milk, with a vegetable folded through it. The technique is French in origin, filtered into American teaching kitchens of the 1880s and 1890s through the domestic-science movement, which prized standard proportions a student could memorise: so much butter, so much flour, so much liquid. Cauliflower itself was a familiar market vegetable in New England by this date.