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Cauliflower Salad
Boil one large cauliflower for half an hour in two quarts of boiling water to which one tablespoonful of salt has been added; then take it out to drain, and after it is cold divide it into small branches. Arrange these in the center of a dish, and garnish the edge with a strip of pickled beets. Pour cream dressing or a breakfast cupful of mayonnaise dressing over the cauliflower, and arrange a star of the pickled beet in the center. Serve it as quickly as possible after it is prepared.
A plain composed salad of the sort that filled the cold side of a Waldorf menu. The only real problem with it is the boiling time.
- Cut the cooking timeHalf an hour in boiling water reduces cauliflower to sulphurous mush that collapses when you break it into florets. Eight to twelve minutes for a whole trimmed head, or five to six minutes for separated florets, gets it tender at the stem while still holding its shape; steaming works better still. Shock it in cold water to stop the cooking and set the colour.
- Salt and waterOne tablespoon of salt to two quarts is a light hand by modern standards for vegetable cookery. Doubling it seasons the cauliflower from the inside, which matters in a salad where nothing else is seasoned.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup was reckoned larger than a teacup, commonly somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 fluid ounces, so read this as roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of mayonnaise. For a single large head that is generous; start with less and add at the table.
- Cream dressingIn this period "cream dressing" usually meant either a cooked dressing thickened with egg and finished with cream, or plain heavy cream sharpened with vinegar, mustard and salt. It is not sour cream and it is not a vinaigrette.
- Pickled beetsJarred pickled beets are a fair substitute, drained and blotted dry. Cut the star and the border strips at the last moment and keep them off the dressing until serving, or the red bleeds pink across the whole dish.
- Why the hurryThe instruction to serve as quickly as possible is the hinge. Mayonnaise on wet cauliflower thins and slides fairly quickly, and the beet dye travels. Dress and garnish immediately before it goes to the table.
- YieldOne large cauliflower dressed this way serves four to six as a salad course.
Cauliflower is often said to have reached American tables as a luxury vegetable, difficult to grow well and priced accordingly, which may be part of why a boiled head under mayonnaise could stand as a course in a hotel dining room in the period. The presentation is pure Gilded Age service: a mound in the centre, a border and a cut star of contrasting colour, the dressing poured over rather than tossed through, so the dish arrives looking built rather than mixed. Oscar Tschirky's book is full of such arrangements, and the salad chapters in particular show how much of restaurant cooking at the Waldorf was a matter of assembly and garnish. The long boil reflects the general nineteenth-century conviction that vegetables should be cooked thoroughly soft; the shift toward brief cooking for colour and texture belongs to the twentieth century.