Home › Soups › Pepper (Soak cauliflower head down one)
Pepper (Soak cauliflower head down one)
Soak cauliflower, head down, one hour in cold water to cover; cook in boiling salted water twenty minutes. Reserve one-half flowerets, and rub remaining cauliflower through sieve. Cook onion, celery, and bay leaf in butter five minutes. Remove bay leaf, then add flour, and stir into hot stock; add cauliflower and milk. Season with salt and pepper; then strain, add flowerets, and reheat.
This is the method half of a cream of cauliflower soup; the ingredient list that belonged with it has been lost in the page break, so quantities have to be supplied by the cook. The proportions below are the standard ones this book uses for its cream soups.
- Missing quantitiesThe original gives no amounts at all. A workable reading for one medium cauliflower is 1 small onion and 2 stalks celery, 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 3 cups white stock or chicken stock, and 1 cup milk, with 1 bay leaf. Treat this as a reconstruction, not the book's own figures.
- The soakingAn hour head-down in cold salted or plain water was insect insurance for garden cauliflower. With supermarket heads it is optional; a quick rinse of the broken florets does the same work.
- Cook the florets lessTwenty minutes in boiling water suited whole heads and Victorian taste. Break the head into florets and give the ones you intend to reserve whole 5 to 7 minutes so they hold shape; the portion destined for the sieve can cook longer, since it is being pureed anyway.
- Cook out the flourThe hinge of the recipe. After the vegetables have softened in butter, stir in the flour and let it cook a full minute before the hot stock goes in, or the soup tastes pasty. Add the stock hot and in stages, whisking, to avoid lumps.
- StrainingA sieve or food mill was the only option when this book was written; a blender gives a smoother result in seconds. Still pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want the silky texture the original intends, then return the reserved florets.
- Reheat, do not boilOnce the milk is in, keep the soup below a simmer. Boiling a milk-thickened puree makes it catch on the pan bottom and can curdle it if the stock is at all acidic.
- YieldThe book gives no yield. On the reconstructed quantities above, about 1 1/2 quarts, serving four to six as a first course.
Cream soups of this kind recur through Fannie Farmer's soup chapter: a vegetable cooked and sieved, a butter-and-flour roux, stock and milk, and a few whole pieces of the vegetable held back for texture and to identify the bowl. The pattern is a domesticated version of the French puree and veloute families. Cauliflower was still commonly sold with its leaves on, and could carry insects, which is why the recipe opens with an hour's soak head-down in cold water. The recipe's odd title here appears to be an artifact of the book's page layout rather than anything the author wrote.