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Fowl, Duck, Game, Hare: Cauliflower
No. 159. Cavoli fiori alla Lionese (Cauliflower) Ingredients:
Cauliflower, butter, onions, parsley, lemon, Espagnole sauce.
Blanch a cauliflower and boil it, but not too much.
Cut up a small onion, fry it slightly in butter and chopped parsley, and when it is well coloured, add the cauliflower and finish cooking it, then take it out, put it in a dish, pour a good Espagnole sauce (No. 1) over it, and add a squeeze of lemon juice.
No. 160. Cavoli fiori fritti (Cauliflower) Ingredients: Cauliflower or broccoli, gravy, lemon, salt, eggs, butter. or Break up a broccoli cauliflower into little bunches, blanch them, and put them on the fire in a saucepan with good gravy for a few minutes, then marinate them with lemon juice and salt, let them get cold, egg them over, and fry in butter.
No. 161. Cauliflower alla Parmigiana Ingredients: Cauliflower, butter, Parmesan, Cheddar, Espagnole, stock.
Boil a cauliflower in salted water, then sautez it in butter, but be careful not to cook it too much. Take it off the fire and strew grated Parmesan and Cheddar over it, then put in a fire-proof dish and add a good spoonful of stock and one of Espagnole (No. 1), and put it in the oven for ten minutes.
No. 162. Cavoli Fiori Ripieni Ingredients: Cauliflower, butter, stock, forcemeat of fowl, tongue, truffles, mushrooms, parsley, Espagnole, eggs. a a Break up cauliflower into separate little bunches, blanch them, and put them in butter, and a quarter pint of reduced stock.
Make a forcemeat of fowl, add bits of tongue, truffles, mushrooms, and parsley, all cut up small and mixed with butter. With this mask the pieces of cauliflower, egg and Cut all the green off a head of celery, trim the rest.
Cut it into pieces about four inches long, blanch and braize them in good stock, ham, salt, and pepper. When cooked, drain and arrange them on a dish, sprinkle with grated Parmesan and Cheddar, and add one and a half ounce of butter, then put them in the oven till they have taken a good colour, pour a little good gravy over them and serve.
Four cauliflower dishes run together in one entry, with a stray celery recipe tacked on where No. 162 breaks off mid-sentence. Read them as separate short recipes; each assumes you already have Espagnole sauce and a competent hand with butter.
- The text is defectiveNo. 162 stops at "egg and" — the missing words are almost certainly "crumb them and fry." What follows ("Cut all the green off a head of celery...") belongs to a different recipe entirely and has nothing to do with cauliflower.
- Espagnole is the hingeThree of the four dishes depend on it, and the book means the real thing: brown stock thickened with a browned roux and reduced with mirepoix and tomato, taking hours. Without it these become plain buttered cauliflower. A well-reduced brown stock or a good jus is the honest substitute; canned gravy is not.
- "Blanch and boil" is one operationA preliminary boil in salted water, then finishing. The repeated warning "not too much" (Nos. 159 and 161) is the point: the cauliflower is cooked again in butter, and in No. 161 in the oven as well, so pull it while the stem still resists a knife.
- Quarter pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. "Reduced stock" means it should already be thick and glossy before it goes in with the butter.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives none. For No. 161's ten minutes a hot oven, in the region of 400F, is enough to melt the cheese and no longer; the celery, which must "take a good colour," will want hotter still, or a minute under the broiler.
- Cheddar in an Italian bookBoth cheese dishes here pair Parmesan with Cheddar, a sign the book was written for English larders. Gruyere or a young provolone gives a closer melt if you want the dish to taste Italian.
- "Marinate" in No. 160It means a brief steep in lemon juice and salt, not an overnight soak. The florets are already cooked; they need only to cool in the acid so it penetrates before they are egged and fried.
- Forcemeat for No. 162Raw chicken breast pounded or processed to a paste with butter, then the tongue, truffle, mushroom and parsley folded in. Masked florets should be chilled firm before egging and crumbing or the coating slides off in the pan.
- YieldOne large head serves four as a vegetable course. The stuffed and fried versions, being richer, serve four as a first course on their own.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) is credited to Mrs W. G. Waters; her husband, W. G. Waters, was the translator of Renaissance Italian texts. It is framed as ten dinners cooked over ten days by a house party — an explicit nod to Boccaccio. Its purpose was to persuade English households that Italian vegetable cookery was worth learning at a time when plainly boiled cauliflower was the usual English treatment, and the four recipes here show the range being offered: Lyonnaise onion and parsley, fried in egg, gratinated with cheese, and stuffed with a fowl forcemeat. The last of these belongs to the grand French repertoire rather than to any Italian home kitchen, and the presence of Cheddar beside Parmesan is a reminder that the book was translating for English larders as much as English palates. The name alla Lionese signals onions, the Lyon convention.