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Mashed Cauliflowers
After boiling two cauliflowers cut the heads up into small branches. Put one teaspoonful of chopped onion into a saucepan with a small piece of butter and place the pan on a slow fire for about fifteen minutes; then throw in the cauliflowers and beat well with a wooden spoon; put in ten or a dozen tablespoonfuls of good white broth and one tablespoonful of flour and boil for fifteen or twenty minutes longer, adding one teaspoonful of sugar and one-half teaspoonful of salt. Pass the mixture through a sieve into another stewpan, add about a gill of cream or milk, and serve. If it is too thick add more milk.
A cauliflower purée thinned with broth and cream — closer to a thick soup or a spoonable side than what modern cooks call mashed cauliflower. A few of Oscar's shorthand terms need translating.
- A gillHalf a cup (4 fl oz). That much cream into two cauliflowers' worth of purée gives a loose, sauce-like consistency; the final line about adding more milk tells you he expected it looser still.
- White brothA pale veal or chicken stock, light because the bones were not browned. A light chicken stock works; avoid dark, reduced stock, which will muddy the colour that is half the point of the dish.
- "Slow fire" for the onionLow heat, and the fifteen minutes is not padding — the onion should go translucent and sweet without taking any colour. Browned onion shows up as grey flecks in a white purée.
- The flour goes in rawAdding it with the broth rather than cooking it into the butter first means it needs the full fifteen to twenty minutes of boiling to lose its raw taste. Stir often; a floury purée catches on the pan bottom.
- Sieve, or blenderPassing through a sieve was the standard route to smoothness in 1896. A food processor or immersion blender does the work in seconds, though a final push through a fine sieve still removes the stalk fibres.
- Two cauliflowersTwo modern heads of about 2 lb each will make a generous quantity; use one large head for a smaller batch.
- The sugarA teaspoon is there to lift the sulphurous edge of boiled cauliflower, not to sweeten. Taste before adding it — cauliflower roasted or steamed rather than hard-boiled may not need it at all.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and the vegetable chapters of his 1896 book are essentially French classical cookery written out for an American audience: this is a purée de chou-fleur, the cauliflower version of the sieved vegetable purées that Carême and his successors set beside roasts and served as the base of cream soups. The distinction between a purée and a soup was thin — the closing instruction to thin it with more milk would, with a little more, turn the same pan into what a French kitchen would call a crème Dubarry, the name traditionally attached to cauliflower dishes in honour of Louis XV's mistress. The recipe depends throughout on the sieve, a step no home cook now performs the same way.