Cauliflower
Cauliflower should be placed head down in cold salted water for fifteen minutes before cooking, to draw out insects. In boiling, slightly salted water should be used, and the head should be placed downward in the kettle; cook until tender. Serve with cream or butter sauce.
A bare-bones set of directions from an era when cauliflower arrived from the garden with tenants. The soak and the head-down orientation are the two things worth keeping; the boiling time is where modern practice differs.
- The salt soakFifteen minutes head-down in cold salted water still works to flush out aphids and cabbage worms from between the curds. Supermarket cauliflower rarely needs it, but it costs nothing with farm or garden heads.
- Head down in the kettleThe stem is denser than the florets and takes longer to soften.
- "Cook until tender"A whole medium head takes 12-15 minutes at a bare simmer; florets take 5-7. Test the stem with a knife tip. Boiled past that point cauliflower goes gray-yellow and releases its sulfur compounds in force.
- Salt the water properlyUse about a tablespoon per gallon; cauliflower absorbs very little and needs help.
- Cream or butter sauceButter sauce here means melted butter, sometimes with lemon or a little of the cooking water. Cream sauce is a plain white sauce: 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk, salt and white pepper. Both are standard in books of this type.
- Keeping it whiteA tablespoon of lemon juice or milk in the water keeps the head pale. Iron and aluminum pans were traditionally avoided as liable to darken the curd.
- YieldA medium head, about 2 lb trimmed, serves four as a side.
Cauliflower reached English and American kitchens as a luxury vegetable, difficult to grow well and prone to bolting or browning in heat, which is why nineteenth-century seedsmen advertised named strains like Early Snowball with the fervor usually reserved for roses. The insistence on soaking is a reminder of what pre-pesticide, pre-refrigeration produce was actually like: cabbage worms and aphids nest deep in the curd and a brine bath was a common household remedy, recommended for broccoli and Brussels sprouts on the same principle. Serving it under a white sauce was a commonplace of Anglo-American cookery of the period, the same treatment given to onions, celery and salsify.