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Cauliflower, with White Sauce
Remove the green and imperfect leaves from the cauliflower, and place it, top downward in a dish of cold, salted water, to draw out dust and other impurities. Now wrap it in a piece of cheesecloth or in a twine net made for such purposes, drop it, stem downward, into hot, salted water, and boil twenty minutes. Lift it out very carefully and allow it to drain in a warm place. Pour over the cauliflower, or send to table with it in a sauce-boat, a cream sauce. Sometimes hot boiled cauliflower is sprinkled with grated cheese and then with buttered cracker or bread crumbs, after which it is baked to a light brown.
A straightforward late-Victorian treatment of a whole head, with two finishes. The only real technical trap is the boiling time.
- Twenty minutes is too longTwenty minutes is on the long side -- a whole trimmed head in salted boiling water is usually done nearer 15 minutes for a small head; test the stem with a knife tip rather than trusting the clock, as overcooking gives grey, sulphurous, collapsing florets. Break the head into large florets and the time drops to 5-6 minutes.
- The soakHead-down in cold salted water, aimed at "dust and other impurities," which in a garden head would have included insects in the curd. Still worth doing with a farm-market head; supermarket cauliflower rarely needs it.
- Cheesecloth or netThe wrapping keeps the head from breaking apart and makes it liftable in one piece. A snug layer of cheesecloth tied at the stem works; so does a steamer basket, which is easier and treats the vegetable more gently.
- Cream sauceThe recipe assumes a white sauce made up separately; a standard bechamel of roughly 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon and seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, will serve. Have it ready before the cauliflower comes out of the pot.
- "Drain in a warm place"This matters more than it sounds. A wet head thins the sauce; set it on a folded towel in a warm oven with the door ajar for a few minutes so the water in the curd drains off.
- The baked variationFor the cheese-and-crumb finish, about 3 oz grated sharp cheese and a cup of crumbs tossed in 2 tbsp melted butter will cover an average head. The recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven, browning it just until the top colours, is what "baked to a light brown" implies. "Buttered cracker crumbs" most likely means crushed plain soda crackers rather than sweet ones.
- YieldOne average head, about 2 lb trimmed, serves four as a side dish.
Cauliflower reached English and American tables as a garden luxury: slow to grow, easily ruined, and prized for a white, tight curd, which is why so many nineteenth-century writers fuss over keeping it whole and unblemished. The Butterick Cook Book (published by the pattern company as part of its broad program of household instruction for middle-class women) boils the vegetable and then dresses it with a white sauce. The baked cheese-and-crumb version at the end is the ancestor of the cauliflower gratin still made today; the mention of "a twine net made for such purposes" as an alternative to cheesecloth is a reminder that the period's kitchen shops sold single-purpose gadgets in the same abundance ours do.