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Cream of Cauliflower Soup (This Cook a good sized)
This 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 pint of milk and thicken it with a tablespoonful of butter and one tablespoonful of flour. Then add the sprigs of cauliflower and boil slowly for twenty minutes. Pass all through a colander, mashing the cauliflower finely. Return the soup to the fire when strained, season with pepper, salt, and a dash of tarragon vinegar, and let it simmer slowly, stirring it constantly for ten minutes. Add a half cup of cream and serve at once with croutons.
A straightforward cream soup with one odd feature: the printed text never says to combine the quart of stock with the milk base, though the finished quantity makes clear it must be. Read the whole thing before you start.
- The missing stepThe stock is set to boil at the beginning and then never mentioned again. Add it to the thickened milk along with the cauliflower sprigs, or you will be pushing a stiff puree through the colander with a quart of hot stock sitting idle beside you.
- White stockA pale, unbrowned stock from veal bones or chicken, with no tomato or roasted vegetables to colour it. Any light chicken stock works; avoid dark commercial beef base, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- A blade of maceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold whole in curved "blades" or ground. One blade is roughly a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace, added at the end rather than infused, since ground spice will not strain out.
- Half pint, half cupA half pint is one cup of milk. The finished soup takes a quart of stock plus that cup plus a half cup of cream, about five and a half cups of liquid before the cauliflower is added: four to six servings.
- Don't overcook the cauliflowerTwenty minutes to blanch, then twenty more in the soup, is a great deal of boiling. Cauliflower held that long turns sulphurous and grey. Blanch until just tender, five to eight minutes for florets, and give it ten minutes in the soup before straining.
- The colanderPassing the soup through a colander while mashing is the period's version of a food mill; it removes the onion and mace and leaves a slightly rustic texture. A blender or immersion blender gives a smoother result, but strain the aromatics out first.
- After the cream goes inThe instruction to simmer ten minutes with constant stirring applies before the cream. Once the cream is in, heat it through without boiling, or the soup may separate.
- Tarragon vinegarA dash means half a teaspoon or less. It is there to lift a bland vegetable, not to be tasted as vinegar; plain white wine vinegar with a bruised tarragon sprig steeped in it does the same job.
Cream soups of this kind were a fixture of American middle-class dinners around 1900, when the standard pattern was a thickened white stock, a milk base flavoured with onion and a whole spice, a pureed vegetable, and cream stirred in at the last moment. The mace is the tell: it was the conventional seasoning for anything white, and is often said to have been preferred for not specking the surface. Cauliflower itself had become widely available in American markets by the late nineteenth century and was treated as a slightly genteel vegetable, more often boiled whole and sauced than eaten raw. Books of this era routinely printed recipes in continuous prose without ingredient lists, which is how a step like adding the stock could quietly go missing.