No. 710

Puree of Cauliflower or Sea-Kale

Puree de Choux-fleurs ou de Choux de Mer

Cut a cauliflower weighing two pounds into four parts, clean well, and set on to cook in a tinned vessel with salted water and two ounces of butter; when done, drain, and put the pieces into the saucepan to finish cooking with one quart of beef stock (No. 194a), four ounces of bread-crumbs, salt and sugar, reduce till dry, then mash well the cauliflower, adding half a quart of allemande sauce (No. 407); press through a sieve and keep the puree warm, stirring in two ounces of butter just before serving.

Sea-kale is to be prepared exactly the same.

← No. 709 Puree of Carrots Garnishings No. 711 Puree of Celery, Celery Knobs and Cardoons →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French vegetable purée from Ranhofer's kitchen brigade, built to be spooned around a roast or piped as a garnish rather than served as a soup. Two things carry it: the reduction must go genuinely dry before the sauce goes in, and the allemande must never boil once it does.

Tinned vesselA "tinned vessel" is a tin-lined copper pan, the standard white-metal cookware of the period; the tin lining kept pale vegetables from taking colour off bare copper or iron. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
Allemande sauceNo. 407 is a velouté finished with egg yolks and cream, sharpened with lemon. Once it is stirred into the cauliflower, keep the purée below a simmer, or the yolks can curdle and the texture go grainy.
Reduce till dryThe hinge of the recipe. A quart of stock and four ounces of crumbs must cook down until the mass barely slumps in the pan; if any free liquid remains, the finished purée will be soup rather than a garnish that holds its shape.
Bread-crumbsFour ounces of dry, fine white crumbs is about a cupful, used here as a binder in place of potato or rice. Use stale crumbs from a plain loaf, not seasoned packaged crumbs.
Sea-kaleCrambe maritima, sold blanched as pale forced shoots in Victorian markets and now almost impossible to buy in North America. Substitute the same weight of trimmed cardoon or celery hearts, which behave similarly under long cooking.
Sugar and saltThe sugar reads as a seasoning corrective rather than a sweetener, a common touch in period vegetable purées. A teaspoon in two pounds of cauliflower is ample.
SievePressing through a drum sieve gives the smoothest result, but a food mill or a short blitz in a processor followed by a pass through a fine chinois is faster and no coarser. Avoid a blender, which whips air into it.
YieldAbout a quart of finished purée, enough to garnish eight to ten plates. It holds in a bain-marie for an hour; stir in the final two ounces of butter only at the moment of service.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house's working manual, organised the way a brigade thinks — a long section of garnishes and purées meant to be cross-referenced against roasts and entrées elsewhere in the book. Purées of this kind, bound with a rich mother sauce and pressed through a sieve, were the standard nineteenth-century way of giving a vegetable enough body to be piped, moulded or banked against meat. The pairing of cauliflower with sea-kale in a single entry reflects how interchangeable the two were on a formal menu of the period: sea-kale, forced under pots in English and American kitchen gardens through the winter, was a prestige vegetable then and has largely dropped out of commerce since, which is why a recipe that treats it as an obvious equivalent to cauliflower now reads as a small piece of horticultural history.