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Cauliflowers in Mayonnaise
Select some large cold boiled cauliflowers and break them into small branches, adding a little salt, pepper and vinegar to properly season; then heap them on a dish so that they will form a point. Surround the dish with a garnish of cooked carrots, turnips and green vegetables, pour some white mayonnaise sauce over all, and serve.
A cold composed salad from the Waldorf's larder station, written for cooks who already had boiled cauliflower and a bowl of mayonnaise on hand. Two things decide whether it works: how far you cook the cauliflower, and when you season it.
- Season while warmThe salt, pepper and vinegar season the florets rather than merely garnish them. The recipe as written starts from cauliflower already boiled and cold; if you are boiling it yourself, tossing the florets while they are still warm helps them take up the acid before chilling.
- "Branches"Reflects the French practice of dividing a cauliflower into small bouquets — florets broken from the head by hand along their natural divisions, as the recipe's "break" implies, rather than cut with a knife. "Branches" is not a literal rendering of bouquets.
- How far to boilCook in well-salted water until a knife meets slight resistance, roughly 5-7 minutes for small florets, then drain and spread on a tray to cool. Victorian and Edwardian cookery books commonly give 20 minutes or more for cauliflower, which gives the grey, sulphurous result the dish is unfairly remembered for.
- "White mayonnaise sauce"Most likely plain mayonnaise of oil, egg yolk, vinegar and salt, distinguished from the tinted and flavoured mayonnaise variants of the period rather than from any particular ingredient. Thin it with a spoonful of cream or cold water so it coats rather than sits in a mass — a stiff mayonnaise will slide off the pyramid in sheets.
- Raw eggMayonnaise here is uncooked. If serving to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise loosened with cream.
- The garnishCarrots and turnips would be boiled separately and cut into small dice or turned into olive shapes; "green vegetables" here would most likely mean peas, green beans cut short, or flageolets. Cook each apart so the colours stay distinct, and arrange them in bands or clusters around the base rather than mixed.
- Building the pointSet the largest florets stem-down as a base and work upward with smaller ones, stems inward. A small bowl lined with plastic wrap, packed and inverted onto the dish, gives the same dome with less fuss.
- Yield and timingRoughly two medium heads will serve six as a first course or side, though the recipe calls for large cauliflowers and gives no quantities. Assemble no more than an hour before serving and keep it cold; mayonnaise over vegetables weeps as it stands, and the pyramid will slump.
This is French chou-fleur à la mayonnaise, one of a family of cold vegetable salads that Escoffier's generation classed under hors-d'œuvre and salades composées, and it appears in Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book as a shape as much as a dish. The pyramid, the ring of turned root vegetables, the sauce poured over at the last moment: this is garde-manger cooking, the cold-kitchen craft that a large hotel maintained as a department of its own, where presentation was the whole point. Mayonnaise itself was still generally made by hand in 1896; the first commercial jarred versions in the United States are generally traced to the 1900s and 1910s, well after this book. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the volume as a whole, which describes the arrangement and nothing else.