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French Fried Cauliflower
Clean a cauliflower, separate into good-sized flowerettes, dust with salt, dip in egg and crumbs as directed for French Fried Onions and cook in deep Mazola.
A terse recipe that leans on a cross-reference the modern reader does not have in front of them. Everything hinges on par-cooking the cauliflower before it goes into the fat.
- Blanch firstRaw florets of "good-sized" thickness will not cook through in the time the crumb coating takes to brown. Boil or steam them until barely tender, 4-5 minutes, then drain and dry thoroughly before breading.
- "Dip in egg and crumbs"The standard sequence of the period, and still the right one: beaten egg thinned with a spoonful of water or milk, then fine dry breadcrumbs. Flouring the florets before the egg helps the coating grip a wet vegetable.
- MazolaA corn oil, on the market from about 1911 and still sold today. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil works; the brand name is the book's own, which points to a volume issued to promote the product.
- Deep fat temperatureThe original gives none. 375F is right for a crumbed coating that needs about two minutes to colour. Below 350F the crumbs absorb oil; above 400F they darken before the interior warms through.
- Fry in batchesCauliflower florets are bulky and cool the fat fast. Six or eight pieces at a time in a domestic pot, drained on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Salt timingThe recipe salts the vegetable before breading, which seasons it but also draws moisture. A second light salting straight out of the fat does more for the flavour.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish. Fried cauliflower does not hold well; it wants to go from the pot to the table.
This is a page from one of the corn-products cookbooks that American food manufacturers issued in the first decades of the twentieth century, in which the recipes steer toward the sponsor's oil, starch or syrup. "French fried" in this period generally meant cooked submerged in deep fat, as distinct from pan-frying; the phrase attached itself to potatoes so firmly that its older, broader sense has largely dropped away, though onions and cauliflower were treated the same way and appear in the same books. Cauliflower, a cool-weather crop that keeps reasonably well, was a common autumn and winter vegetable on American tables.