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Creamed Cauliflower
Remove leaves, cut off stalk, and soak thirty minutes (head down) in cold water to cover. Cook (head up) twenty minutes or until soft in boiling salted water; drain, separate flowerets, and reheat in one and one-half cups White Sauce I.
A two-sentence recipe that assumes you already know the sauce and the era's tolerance for very soft vegetables. Both are worth adjusting.
- The hinge: cut the cooking timeTwenty minutes of boiling gives you waterlogged cauliflower and a strong sulfurous smell. Separate the head into florets first and boil them 5 to 8 minutes, until a knife tip meets slight resistance; a whole head, if you want the presentation, needs 10 to 15.
- Why the head goes down, then upThe recipe's initial soak is head-down in plain cold water (no salt), thirty minutes; the reason usually given for it is to float out insects hiding in the curd. Modern cauliflower rarely needs it, though a short soak does no harm. Cooking head-up keeps the delicate curd out of the fiercest boil at the bottom of the pot.
- White Sauce IThe thinnest of the book's numbered white sauces: butter, flour, milk, salt and a little pepper. Check the book's own White Sauce I for the exact proportion, which varies between editions (somewhere between 1 and 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk), and scale it to the one and a half cups called for here. Cook the roux a minute before adding the milk so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Drain thoroughlyCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water and will thin the sauce into milk. Drain in a colander for a few minutes, or spread the florets on a towel, before combining.
- Leave the pot uncoveredCovering concentrates the sulfur compounds the cabbage family releases. An uncovered pot of well-salted water, and a short cook, is the whole trick to keeping the flavor mild.
- Reheat, do not simmer"Reheat" means warm the florets through in the finished sauce over low heat, a couple of minutes. Boiling them again in the sauce breaks the florets apart and can scorch the milk.
- YieldOne average head serves about four as a side dish. A gratin finish is not in the original but is period-appropriate: buttered crumbs on top, browned under the broiler.
Creamed vegetables are the signature of the American cooking-school kitchen, and this entry shows why: the vegetable is reduced to a technique, and the technique is a cross-reference. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is organized by ingredient chapter, but it leans throughout on a handful of basic white sauces — medium and thick in the 1896 original, numbered White Sauce I through IV only in the later revised editions — so that a cook who had learned one proportion of butter, flour and milk could apply it to cauliflower, onions, celery, salt cod or chicken without relearning anything. The method itself is French in ancestry, a thin béchamel, but the pedagogy is one Farmer did much to popularize, part of the late-nineteenth-century effort to make domestic cooking teachable by measurement rather than by feel. Cauliflower appears to have been a familiar market vegetable in New England by the 1890s, and the long boil recorded here seems to reflect a general period preference for vegetables cooked until fully yielding, a habit often said to have begun reversing in American home cooking in the middle of the twentieth century.