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Cauliflower Cream Soup
The clear, white broth which has had an old fowl boiled tender in it is the best for such soup as this, and any pieces of bones from the breakfast or dinner meats may be put into the stockpot with it to make it richer. Take about a quart of stock, a pint of good rich milk, one pint of cauliflower sprays, one tablespoonful each of butter, salt and white pepper, one tablespoonful of minced parsley, half a blade of mace and a small quantity of any vegetables at hand--cauliflower being the principal one. If cooked for the purpose, pick the cauliflower into little branches, and boil it separately for half an hour in salted water. Strain off one quart of the stock, clear and free from grease, into a saucepan, and boil it with one tablespoonful of minced onion; then mash one breakfast cupful of cooked cauliflower and throw it in; boil one pint of rich milk and add that; season with a little salt and white pepper, if not sufficiently blended, thicken, till it looks like a thin cream, with flour and water; then add one tablespoonful of butter, and the other breakfast cupful of cooked cauliflower branches, and sprinkle on a tablespoonful of minced parsley. It is then ready to be served.
A two-texture soup: half the cauliflower is mashed into the base, half goes in whole at the end. The main thing to fix is the half-hour boil.
- Ignore the tablespoon of salt and pepperThe ingredient list reads "one tablespoonful each of butter, salt and white pepper," which reads as shorthand for grouping three items rather than a real measure for each. A tablespoon of white pepper in six cups of liquid would be inedible; season to taste, and note that the method itself only says "a little salt and white pepper."
- Cut the cauliflower cooking timeHalf an hour in salted water leaves the florets grey and sulphurous. The mashed portion can go 12-15 minutes until quite soft; the sprays that finish the soup want 5-7 minutes, just tender, and are best refreshed in cold water so they hold their shape when they go back in.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read it as a generous cup. Two of them account for the full pint of cauliflower called for at the top.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in blades or ground. Half a blade is a very small amount; a pinch of ground mace, or a scrape of nutmeg, stands in. Add it with the onion so it has time to infuse, and fish out the blade before serving.
- The stock"An old fowl boiled tender" means a stewing hen, which gives a stronger, more gelatinous broth than a young bird. A good unsalted chicken stock works; if using commercial stock, taste before adding any salt at all, since the recipe assumes a broth seasoned by the cook.
- ThickeningFlour slaked in cold water and stirred into simmering liquid needs a couple of minutes at a simmer to lose its raw taste. Slake the flour in at least its own volume of cold water and add it gradually, stopping when the soup looks like the "thin cream" the recipe describes.
- Milk and curdlingBoil the milk separately, as directed, and add it off a hard boil. Once the milk is in, keep the soup below a simmer, as sustained boiling can make the proteins separate.
- YieldSix cups of liquid plus the vegetables makes a substantial quantity, enough for several first-course servings. Finish with the butter off the heat for gloss, and add the parsley at the table rather than letting it sit in hot soup.
Cauliflower cream soup belongs to the long line of nineteenth-century puree soups built on a household stockpot rather than on cream alone, and the opening lines here are as much a lesson in thrift as in cookery: the water from a boiled stewing hen, plus "any pieces of bones from the breakfast or dinner meats," was the working liquid of a kitchen that cooked all day. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel whose name went on this 1896 collection, drew heavily on the domestic and hotel repertoire of his day, and the recipe's split treatment of the cauliflower - part mashed into the body of the soup, part kept whole as a garnish - is often described as the French approach to a creme of any single vegetable, here with a flour-and-water thickening rather than a roux or an egg liaison. Mace, now uncommon, was then a routine seasoning for pale soups and sauces, and it is often said that it flavoured them without staining them.