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Cauliflower Fritters
(Italy.) The Italians make everything into fritters. Fritters are, like macaroni, a national dish. Parboil and drain a fine fresh cauliflower, cut it into branches and dip each into a frying batter. Make this of a tablespoonful of flour, 1 ounce of butter, 1/2 cup of milk, and the yolk of an egg well beaten, salt, and pepper. Fry in boiling fat. Serve alone, or with a good sauce. MUSHROOMS ON TOAST.(A French recipe.) Slice and peel 1 pound of fresh mushrooms, add 1/2 cup of water, 2 ounces of butter, salt, pepper, and juice of a lemon. Cook 10 minutes, strain it, add to the sauce 1/2 cup of white stock, the yolk of an egg, and a little nutmeg. Toast 3 large pieces of bread, put the mushrooms on top, and pour the sauce over; garnish with parsley.
MUSHROOMS (as cooked in Southern France, or Provence.). Peel, slice, and fry 1 pound of fresh mushrooms in some butter with onion, a clove of garlic, if desired, salt, pepper, and a cup of stewed tomatoes, cooked with a tablespoonful of stock, some parsley, and a bayleaf. Add some chopped capers, and serve at once, hot.
Three short recipes run together here, all built on the same idea: a vegetable cooked briefly, then dressed either in batter or in a butter-and-egg sauce. The batter proportions in the first are the one thing that needs attention before you start.
- The batter as written is too thinOne tablespoon of flour to half a cup of milk plus a yolk and an ounce of butter gives something closer to thin cream than a coating batter, and it will slide off the florets in the fat. Either the flour is a scribal slip for a larger measure or the milk is, and there is no way to tell which; work up to a batter that coats the back of a spoon, adding flour by the tablespoon, and hold back milk until you see the consistency.
- Parboil, then dryFour to five minutes in salted boiling water for a cauliflower broken into florets, then drain and spread on a towel. Any surface water will make the batter bead up and spit in the fat. "Branches" simply means florets with a length of stalk left on, which gives you something to hold while dipping.
- "Boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the period phrase means fat hot enough to bubble vigorously when the batter goes in, about 350-375F. Below that the fritters absorb oil, above it the thin batter colors before the cauliflower heats through.
- The spare egg whiteOnly the yolk is called for. Whipping the white and folding it into the finished batter is a common trick in fritter batters and gives a lighter shell; the book does not ask for it, but the ingredient is already in your hand.
- White stockIn the mushroom recipe this means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly seasoned. Any low-sodium chicken stock stands in, but avoid dark or roasted stocks, which will muddy the color the dish is built around.
- Adding the yolk to the sauceOff the heat, and slowly. Whisk a ladle of the hot strained liquid into the yolk first, return the mixture to the pan, and keep it below a simmer or it will curdle rather than thicken.
- Mushroom peelingBoth mushroom recipes say to peel, which made sense for large field mushrooms with tough, gritty skins. Cultivated button, cremini or portobello need only a wipe; trim the stem end and leave the caps intact.
- YieldThe fritters from a single head serve four as a side dish. The mushrooms on toast are specified as three slices of toast, so two to three servings; the Provencal version, with tomato, serves three or four alongside meat.
The book's remark that Italians "make everything into fritters" is less a caricature than it looks: fried vegetables in batter run through Italian regional cooking from fritto misto to the Jewish-Roman tradition of fried artichokes and cauliflower in Rome's old ghetto, where cauliflower fried in batter is still sold as cavolfiore fritto. Cauliflower was long treated as a novelty in northern Europe; early English writers credited it variously to Cyprus and to Italy, and seed was imported while it remained a luxury garden vegetable. A cookbook of this sort, arranged by nation and written for an English-speaking household, sorts its dishes by place, and the three recipes here show the pattern: one tagged Italy, one France, and one narrowed to Provence, where the garlic, tomato, caper and bay make a Mediterranean signature the book presents as distinct from Paris.