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Cream of Cauliflower Soup (Cook a good sized cauliflower)
Cook a good sized cauliflower for twenty minutes and put on a quart of white stock to boil. Drain the cauliflower when it has cooked sufficiently to divide into sprigs. Boil a blade of mace and half an onion with half a pint of milk and thicken it with ounce of butter and one ounce of flour; then add the sprigs of cauliflower and boil, slowly for twenty minutes. Pass all through a colander, washing the cauliflower finely. Return the soup to the fire when strained and let it simmer slowly, stirring it constantly for ten minutes. Add a half cup of whipped cream and serve at once. Serve fried slice of bread with this soup, seasoning this soup with pepper, salt and a dash of tarragon vinegar.
A straightforward veloute-style puree that reads oddly because the quart of white stock is never explicitly added back. Sort that out first and the rest follows.
- The missing stepThe stock is set to boil at the start and then dropped from the narrative. Combine it with the thickened milk and cauliflower before the final simmer, or you will have a very stiff puree rather than soup.
- White stockAn unsalted light stock of veal or chicken bones and aromatics, simmered without browning. A pale, low-sodium chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid dark or heavily reduced stock, which will muddy the colour.
- UnitsA quart is 4 cups, half a pint is 1 cup, and an ounce each of butter and flour is about 2 tablespoons butter and a scant 1/4 cup flour. The original prints "ounce of butter" without the numeral, but the paired ounce of flour makes one ounce the clear reading.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold in whole blades or ground. Use one blade, or a pinch of ground mace, and remove the blade before pureeing along with the onion.
- Cooking timesTwenty minutes at the start plus twenty more in the milk overcooks the florets badly and dulls both colour and flavour. Ten to twelve minutes of initial boiling until just tender, then ten in the soup base, gives a cleaner result.
- Straining"Washing the cauliflower finely" means working the pulp through the colander with the back of a spoon or a wooden pestle so the solids pass rather than sitting in the sieve. A blender or immersion blender does this in seconds; pass through a fine sieve afterwards if you want it silky.
- The whipped creamFold it in off the heat, immediately before serving. Boiling after the cream goes in collapses it and can curdle the soup.
- Tarragon vinegarA dash only, added at the end. It lifts the sweetness of the cauliflower; cider vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped in it for an hour is a serviceable stand-in.
- YieldRoughly six cups, serving four to six as a first course, depending on how much of the stock is added back. The fried bread is best cut into small dice and crisped in butter.
Cream soups of this kind resemble the French creme Dubarry, a cauliflower puree traditionally said to be named for Madame du Barry, though no line of descent for this particular recipe can be demonstrated. The structure here is textbook: a white roux loosened with milk and light stock, the vegetable cooked in it, then sieved and finished with cream. Mace and onion boiled in the milk is a long-standing English seasoning habit in white sauces, and bottled flavoured vinegars, tarragon among them, were readily available by this period. The fussiness of pressing everything through a colander by hand is a reminder that the smooth pureed soup was a marker of skill in a kitchen without a blender.