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Cauliflower in Mold
(Sformato di cavolfiore) Take a good sized cauliflower, remove the stalk and outside leaves, half cook it in water and then cut it into small pieces. Salt them and put them to brown with a little piece of butter and then complete the cooking with a cup of milk. Then rub them through a sieve. Prepare a Balsamella (No. 54) and add it to the cauliflower with 3 beaten eggs and a tablespoonful of grated cheese.
Cook in a greased mold and serve hot.
A sformato is a savory pudding baked in a mold and turned out; the recipe assumes you already know that means a water bath and a mold you can unmold cleanly. The book gives no oven temperature, pan size or timing, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Balsamella is béchamelRecipe No. 54 in this book is the standard flour-butter-milk white sauce. For one medium cauliflower, about a cup of medium-thick béchamel (2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk) is the right proportion — thick enough to hold, not stiff.
- Bake in a bain-marie at 350FThe book gives no oven temperature, pan or timing. An egg-bound puree baked dry can curdle and weep, so set the greased mold in a roasting pan, add hot water halfway up the sides, and bake at about 350F for 45-60 minutes, until a knife inserted at the center comes out clean and the custard is just set.
- Grease and crumb the moldButter the mold generously and dust it with fine dry breadcrumbs or grated cheese. This is what lets the sformato release in one piece; rest it 5-10 minutes before inverting onto a warm plate.
- "Half cook it in water"Boil the whole head or large florets 6-8 minutes in well-salted water — a knife should meet resistance. The browning in butter and the simmer in milk finish the cooking, and overboiling at the start gives a watery purée.
- Sieve or food processorRubbing through a sieve was the standard way to get a smooth puree in 1919. A food processor does it in seconds, but drain off any loose milk first and pulse rather than run it, or the cauliflower turns gluey.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" here most likely means Parmesan or a similar hard grating cheese. One tablespoon is modest; two or three will not hurt the set and improves the flavor considerably.
- Dry the puréeCauliflower holds a great deal of water. Once sieved, cook the purée in a wide pan over moderate heat, stirring, until it stiffens and pulls from the sides before you add the béchamel and eggs. This is the difference between a sliceable mold and a puddle.
- YieldOne medium head (about 2 lb trimmed) with 3 eggs fills a 1-quart mold and serves four as a first course or side.
Sformato comes from sformare, to take out of the form — the dish is named for the act of unmolding rather than for any ingredient. It belongs to the borghese cooking codified by Pellegrino Artusi in La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), a tradition on which this 1919 English-language Italian Cook Book would appear to draw, and the reliance on balsamella — the Italian naturalization of French béchamel — is a marker of that tradition rather than of any regional peasant cooking. Sformati were the respectable way to serve a vegetable at a formal Italian table in the nineteenth century: puréed, enriched, bound with egg, and presented as a shaped course instead of a heap of boiled florets.