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Cauliflower with Cream Sauce
In the usual way cauliflower takes from thirty to forty-five minutes to cook, and it should not be allowed to boil rapidly or it will destroy the small flowerets. Test the stems with a fork, and remove as soon as tender. Put a piece of bicarbonate of soda the size of a bean into the water, and this will hasten the cooking without injuring the cauliflower. Divide the cauliflower into portions of convenient size before cooking, and when drained and dished up pour one or two tablespoonfuls of strained cream-sauce over each portion
A short entry that assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and that a cauliflower will sit in the pot the better part of an hour. Neither assumption holds now.
- The timing is the main thing to changeThirty to forty-five minutes belongs to an era of larger, tougher, longer-stored heads and a taste for very soft vegetables. Florets of convenient size are tender in 5 to 8 minutes in salted boiling water, a whole head in 12 to 15. Test the stem with a knife tip and pull it the moment it gives.
- Skip the bicarbonateThe soda works as described, softening the cell walls and speeding things up, but it also strips vitamin C, dulls the white to a grey-yellow and can leave the florets slimy. With modern cooking times there is nothing to hasten. Salt the water instead.
- Cream sauce means bechamelCream sauce means a white sauce -- In period usage a cream sauce is generally a white roux of butter and flour cooked without colour, let down with hot milk or milk and cream and simmered until it loses any floury taste; seasoning with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg is typical, though this entry specifies none of it. Two tablespoons per portion implies a pourable sauce, not a thick binding one.
- "Strained"Straining a white sauce was routine, and passing it through a fine sieve still gives the smoothest result. If you whisk the hot liquid into the roux off the heat and bring it back slowly there may be nothing to strain.
- Do not let it boil rapidlyOscar is right about this. A hard boil knocks the curd apart and you serve a bowl of loose crumbs. A steady, gentle simmer, or a steamer basket, keeps the florets intact.
- Drain properlyCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in the curd. Let the florets sit in the colander a minute, stem side up, or the sauce will slide off into a puddle on the plate.
- YieldA medium head, about 2 lb trimmed, serves four as a side. At the one to two tablespoonfuls per portion given here, figure roughly 1 to 2 fl oz (2 to 4 tablespoons) of sauce for four servings per tablespoon rate -- i.e. about an eighth of a cup per person at the two-tablespoon rate.
Cauliflower with a white sauce was standard hotel and household vegetable cookery on both sides of the Atlantic by the time Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, the plainest member of a family of dishes that runs up through cauliflower au gratin and chou-fleur a la sauce blanche in French service. The bicarbonate trick appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks, sometimes alongside the same advice for keeping green vegetables green; the chemistry is real, but the cost in flavour, colour and texture may explain why it seems to have faded from professional practice. What the entry really shows is how a hotel kitchen thought about vegetables: cut to a uniform serving size before cooking, held tender rather than soft, sauced individually on the plate rather than tossed together in the pot.