Home › Vegetables › Curried Cauliflower
Curried Cauliflower
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cauliflower 1 sliced onion 1 dessertspoonful curry powder 1 tablespoonful lemon juice 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful stock or water Boil cauliflower in boiling salted water till tender, drain, then divide into small flowerets. Fry onion in Crisco a few minutes, then add curry powder, lemon juice and stock or water. Simmer fifteen minutes, then strain into clean saucepan. Add cauliflower and salt and simmer fifteen minutes.
Serve hot.
A straightforward curried vegetable side from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook. The one thing worth changing is the total cooking time.
- Don't boil the cauliflower firstThe original cooks it fully in salted water, then simmers it another fifteen minutes in the sauce — the florets will collapse into mush. Either blanch 3-4 minutes until barely yielding, or skip the boil and let the florets finish in the sauce for 10-12 minutes.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. With a modern commercial curry powder that is a mild seasoning for a whole head; taste and add more.
- Crisco and substitutionsThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, reformulated since. Any neutral oil, butter or ghee works; 4 tablespoons is generous, and 2 is plenty for one sliced onion.
- Bloom the curry powderThe recipe adds it to the fried onion before the liquid, which is correct and the point of the method — give it 30-60 seconds in the fat to lose its raw, dusty edge before the stock goes in.
- The straining stepStraining out the onion leaves a thin, clear curry sauce in the Edwardian manner. Modern taste generally prefers to leave the onion in, or blend the sauce smooth for more body.
- StockA cupful of water gives a very lean result. Chicken or vegetable stock, or coconut milk in place of some of the liquid, gives the sauce something to cling to.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one average head would serve about four as a side dish.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a brand-new product: a solid, shelf-stable vegetable shortening made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, introduced two years earlier. The book's job was to prove the fat could do everything butter, lard and suet did — frying, pastry, cake, and here, the base of a vegetable curry — and much of it reads as ordinary Anglo-American cookery with the fat swapped out. The curry itself is British-imperial rather than Indian: a single commercial curry powder, a sliced onion, lemon juice and stock, simmered and strained to a thin sauce. That formula reached American kitchens by way of England, where blended curry powders were being advertised by the late eighteenth century. Crisco was also promoted early on as kosher and suitable for vegetarians, though nothing connects that marketing to the inclusion of this particular recipe.