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Cauliflower, Sauce Mousseline
Trim off the outer leaves, cut off the stalk, clean and wash well a fine large, white head of cauliflower. Have a gallon of water in a pan with one tablespoon salt and half pint milk. When it boils add the cauliflower, cover the pan and boil for forty minutes. Drain, dress on a hot dish and serve with the Mousseline sauce separately.
A straightforward boiled cauliflower whose only real trouble is the cooking time. The milk in the water is not seasoning — it is there to keep the head white.
- Forty minutes is far too longForty minutes is far longer than modern practice. A whole trimmed head is usually tender in about 15–20 minutes in boiling water, tested with a knife tip at the thickest part of the core. Prolonged boiling softens the curd badly and brings out the sulphurous smell that gives boiled cauliflower its bad name.
- Why the milkHalf a pint of milk in the cooking water keeps the curd bright white rather than yellowish, and is said to soften the cabbage flavour a little. A tablespoon of lemon juice or a spoon of flour whisked in is used for the same purpose if you would rather not scald milk.
- Salt levelOne tablespoon in a gallon is a light hand by modern standards; many present-day recipes call for roughly twice that in vegetable water.
- Sauce mousselineThe book assumes you know it: hollandaise lightened with softly whipped cream folded in at the last moment, usually a quarter to a third of the volume of the finished sauce. It must be served at once and never reheated, or the cream weeps and the emulsion breaks.
- Keeping it wholeCut a deep cross in the base of the stalk so the core cooks at the same rate as the florets, and lower the head in stalk-down. Some cooks tie the head in muslin to lift it out intact for "dressing on a hot dish."
- DrainingDrain thoroughly and let it stand a minute in the hot pan off the heat; a wet head will thin the mousseline into a puddle on the dish.
- YieldOne large head serves four to six as a vegetable course. The instruction to dress it on a hot dish and hand the sauce separately points to its being sent to table on its own rather than as a garnish to a plated main.
Sauce mousseline is simply hollandaise made airy with whipped cream, and the name says so — mousseline, borrowed from the fine muslin cloth of the same name to suggest lightness. It belongs to the codified French sauce repertoire that spread through professional kitchens in the later nineteenth century and reached English and American cookbooks in the decades on either side of 1900. Serving a whole cauliflower as a dish in its own right, dressed on a hot platter with the sauce handed round separately, is often said to have been usual for the vegetable course in a formal menu of the period; the long boiling times such books prescribe reflect an era before crisp-tender was a virtue, when vegetables were expected to be soft enough to eat with a fork alone.