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Cauliflower Fritters
Cut into equal-sized pieces two well-boiled cauliflowers, dip each piece into thick yellow or white sauce, and place them one side to cool. Take them out with a spoon, put them into a basin of frying-batter, plunge them into a fryingpan of boiling fat and fry to a good color. Serve very hot on a napkin spread over a dish. If it is preferred, the pieces of cauliflower may be dipped into vinegar, oil, salt and pepper mixed together in place of the batter, and then fried.
This is the Villeroy method applied to a vegetable: a thick sauce is used as edible glue, chilled solid, then battered and fried. Everything depends on the sauce setting hard before the fritters go near the fat.
- Chill the coated pieces properly"Place them one side to cool" means letting the sauce set until it is firm to the touch before the pieces go into the batter. A soft coating will slide off in the fryer and the fat will spit.
- Thick yellow or white sauceWhite sauce is a béchamel; yellow is the same enriched with egg yolks, or a velouté. Either must be much thicker than a pouring sauce — roughly 2 tbsp each butter and flour to 1 cup milk, cooked out until it holds a spoon-track.
- "Well-boiled" is not modern donenessDoneness -- Boil the florets only until a knife enters with slight resistance, 4-6 minutes, then drain and dry thoroughly. Cauliflower cooked to collapse will fall apart when you dip and turn it, though the recipe as written calls for "well-boiled."
- Dry the surfaceAny surface water keeps the sauce from clinging. Spread the drained florets on a towel and let them steam off completely before coating.
- Frying temperature"Boiling fat" for fritters means 360-375F. Below that the batter absorbs fat and the sauce inside melts before the crust sets; above it the outside colors before the center warms through. Fry in small batches, two to three minutes.
- The vinaigrette variationThe second method has the pieces dipped in vinegar, oil, salt and pepper instead of batter, then fried; the mixture seasons rather than forms a crisp shell.
- Serving on a napkinA folded linen napkin on the platter was the standard nineteenth-century way to absorb frying fat and keep fritters from sitting in it. A rack or paper does the same job.
- YieldTwo heads of cauliflower give roughly 40-50 pieces — a first course or side for eight to ten. Fried and sauced this way they do not hold; serve within minutes.
Coating a cooked ingredient in a stiff sauce, chilling it, then crumbing or battering and frying is the technique French kitchens call a la Villeroy, traditionally associated with the eighteenth-century Villeroy household. It was a way of making a plain boiled vegetable into a service dish: the sauce supplies richness the cauliflower lacks, and the fried shell keeps it contained on the plate.