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Cream of Cauliflower Soup
Salt. 4 cups hot White Stock II or III 1 cauliflower 1/4 cup butter 1 slice onion 1 stalk celery, cut in inch pieces 1/2 bay leaf 1/4 cup flour 2 cups milk
The book prints this as a proportion list, leaving the method to the general directions for cream soups earlier in the chapter. The assembly is worth spelling out, along with a few ingredients that no longer mean what they did.
- The missing methodFollowing Farmer's standard cream-soup pattern: break the cauliflower into flowerets and cook them in boiling salted water until tender. Scald the milk with the onion, celery and bay leaf, strain; make a roux with the butter and flour, add the strained milk to make a white sauce, then add the hot stock and the cooked cauliflower, rub through a sieve, reheat, and season.
- White Stock II or IIIFarmer's white stocks are made from veal knuckle or from fowl, simmered with aromatics and no browning. A light unsalted chicken stock is the closest modern equivalent; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which muddies the colour the soup is named for.
- The hinge: no boiling after the milk goes inThe hinge: no hard boil after the milk goes in -- Once the flour-thickened milk and the stock are combined, keep the pot at or below a gentle simmer. A hard boil in a soup this starchy can scorch on the bottom, and reheated cauliflower puree picks up a sulfurous edge.
- Cauliflower sizeThe list says only '1 cauliflower' and gives no weight. About 2 lb trimmed suits the 4 cups of stock; much more than that and the liquid will not carry it.
- Don't overcook the vegetableTen to twelve minutes in boiling water is usually enough for small flowerets. Overcooking develops the cabbagey sulfur notes and dulls the colour.
- Seasoning is not listedThis proportion list omits salt and pepper. Reckon on about 1 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon white pepper for this quantity, adjusted to how salty the stock is.
- The roux is a heavy oneThe roux -- 1/4 cup each butter and flour to 2 cups milk works out to 2 tablespoons of each per cup, a medium white sauce on Farmer's scale, and deliberately thick relative to the finished soup since 4 cups of stock follow. If you prefer a thinner soup, thin with additional hot stock rather than cutting the flour.
- YieldAbout 6 cups finished soup, or four to six first-course servings.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book organises its soups by construction rather than by ingredient, and this entry belongs to a long run of near-identical cream soups — asparagus, celery, spinach, corn — built on the same frame of white stock, a butter-and-flour roux, and scalded milk infused with onion, celery and bay. The dish appears as a bare list of proportions: Farmer is generally credited with popularising standardised level measurements, building on earlier Boston Cooking School teaching, and once a student had learned the cream-soup method she was expected to apply it to whatever vegetable was at hand. Cauliflower itself was a comparatively genteel market vegetable in 1890s New England, more expensive than cabbage, which is part of why it turns up in the company of veal stock rather than in plainer cookery.