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Boiled Cauliflower
To each half gallon water allow heaped table-spoon salt; choose close and white cauliflower, trim off decayed outside leaves, and cut stock off flat at bottom; open flower a little in places to remove insects which generally are found about the stalk, and let cauliflowers lie with heads downward in salt and water for two hours previous to dressing them, which will effectually draw out all vermin. Then put into boiling water, adding salt in above proportion, and boil briskly for fifteen or twenty minutes over a good fire, keeping the sauce-pan uncovered. The water should be well skimmed. When cauliflowers are tender, take up, drain, and if large enough, place upright in dish; serve with plain melted butter, a little of which may be poured over the flowers, or a white sauce little of which may be poured over the flowers, or a white sauce may be used made as follows:
Put butter size of an egg into the sauce-pan, and when it bubbles stir in a scant half tea-cup of flour; stir well with an egg-whisk until cooked; then add two tea-cups of thin cream, some pepper and salt. Stir it over the fire until perfectly smooth. Pour the sauce over the cauliflower and serve. Many let the cauliflower simmer in the sauce a few moments before serving. Cauliflower is delicious served as a garnish around spring chicken, or with fried sweet -breads, when the white sauce should be poured over both. In this case it should be made by adding the cream, flour, and seathis case it should be made by adding the cream, flour, and seasoning to the little grease (half a tea-spoon) that is left after frying the chickens or sweet-breads. - Mrs. W. P. Anderson.
A straightforward boiled cauliflower with a béchamel, from a period when vegetables were cooked considerably longer than we cook them now. Two things need adjusting: the boiling time and the flour in the sauce.
- The soakTwo hours head-down in salted water was standard insurance against cabbage worms and aphids hiding in the curd. Supermarket cauliflower rarely needs it; twenty minutes in cold salted water is ample for garden or market heads, and the trimming and flat-cut stalk are still good practice.
- Boiling timeFifteen to twenty minutes will leave a whole modern head soft and sulphurous. A trimmed whole head is tender at 10-12 minutes in well-salted boiling water; florets take 4-6. Test the thickest stem with a knife tip rather than watching the clock.
- Uncovered panThis is the one instruction worth keeping exactly as written. Cauliflower releases sulphur compounds as it cooks, and a lid traps them against the curd, dulling both colour and flavour.
- Salt proportionA heaped tablespoon to a half gallon is roughly 1 tablespoon per 2 quarts, which is about right by modern standards for vegetable water and worth measuring rather than guessing.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons.
- Tea-cupIn American books of this period a tea-cup is smaller than a modern measuring cup, generally reckoned at about 3/4 cup. Two tea-cups of cream is therefore roughly 1 1/2 cups.
- The roux is too thickA scant half tea-cup of flour, near 1/3 cup, against 1 1/2 cups of cream will set almost to a paste. For a pourable sauce use 3 tablespoons of flour to 4 tablespoons of butter and 1 1/2 cups of cream, or thin with a ladle of the cauliflower water.
- The pan-drippings versionThe variation at the end is a fond sauce: cream, flour and seasoning stirred into the fat left from frying chicken or sweetbreads. It works, but with only half a teaspoon of grease the flour has nothing to cook in, so warm it into the cream instead and scrape up the browned bits.
- YieldOne large head serves four as a side dish, three if it is standing in for a vegetable course on its own.
Boiled cauliflower under white sauce was among the vegetable dishes that nineteenth-century American cookbooks treated with some ceremony, and the instruction to stand the head upright in the dish shows why: it was meant to be looked at. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from contributed household receipts, dresses a vegetable in melted butter or a cream sauce rather than serving it plain, and the sauce here is close to a béchamel. The long soak in brine is the detail that dates the recipe most clearly: before commercial insecticides and washed produce, a tight cauliflower curd was a reliable hiding place for cabbage worms, and the head-down soak was common advice in cookbooks of the era. The closing suggestion of cauliflower ringed around spring chicken or fried sweetbreads reflects a service style in which the vegetable garnished the meat rather than sharing the plate with it.</recipe>