Cauliflower The Queen of the Cabbage Kind
Roasted, steamed, boiled, pureed or fried — the cauliflower deserves our most careful consideration
Bengali cuisine is famous for fish and sweets, so it may seem odd that I mentally link it to cauliflowers. The reason is that the most persistent memory I have from my first trips to Kolkata is of the huge cauliflowers piled for sale on the road from Dum Dum airport. Their puffy whiteness, framed by dark leaves, made them look like clouds, swollen with the promise soon to be discharged on our plates.
The cauliflowers seemed to be a sign that I would eat well in Kolkata, and one of the things I took from my years there was a love of Bengal's often underestimated vegetarian food. Cauliflowers demonstrated this well, whether in the simplest dish of phulkopir fried with radhuni and chillies, or a more pungent preparation with aam-kashundi (a pickle-like sauce of green mango and mustard) that I always order at Oh Calcutta restaurant - even if not on the menu, they'll happily make it for you.
It helps too that Bengali food adds non-vegetarian items to accentuate vegetables in a way that reminds us how close it is to Southeast Asia. Chitrita Banerji, the brilliant Bengali food writer, writes to me about a dish of cauliflower
cooked with large prawns with heads intact for their rich juices to add to the flavour. This sounds so good that I feel ready to take the next plane to Kolkata to find it, even though I suspect that the way the city has grown, cauliflowers are no longer sold on the Dum Dum road. I have wondered if there is any rational basis for my feeling that Bengali cooking is particularly brilliant with cauliflowers. In French cuisine the term for dishes made cauliflowers is 'du Barry', as in potage du Barry, a creamy cauliflower soup. This refers to Madame du Barry, a famous courtesan who became the royal mistress of Louis XV. It isn't clear if the link is to her white complexion or curly wigs, or just as a general culinary compliment, but I was fascinated to learn that she had a favourite Bengali servant, a boy called Zamor who was born in Chittagong.
Madame du Barry was apparently kind to the boy, who had been captured and sold as a slave, before becoming a servant in France, and she encouraged his interest in literature. But the French Revolution inflamed Zamor with revolutionary zeal and he betrayed the lady to the Jacobins, who sent her to the guillotine. But just where I was imagining a scenario where Zamor returned home to Chittagong and promoted the cultivation of cauliflowers in a perhaps ironic tribute to his late employer, I learned that he became a school teacher and lived the rest of his life in France.
But I really didn't need to go down this French route, because there's a much more obvious British one. They brought cauliflowers to India, along with several other vegetables, and Bengal was probably one of the first places they planted them simply because it was where they were well established. And they certainly valued cauliflowers: "the queen of the cabbage kind," wrote Colonel Kenney-Herbert, the best known Raj food writer,
adding that it "it well deserves our most careful consideration." This meant just plunging it briefly in boiling water or, better, steaming it, but above all, warmed the colonel, "watch them carefully lest they become overdone."
This excellent advice was, sadly, disregarded by most of his compatriots, as can be seen by those tasteless boiled cauliflower chunks served, along with equally bland carrots and peas, as side-dishes in clubs. Even more regrettably, from there the practice seems to have infected catering colleges since I have come across the same sorry specimens in restaurants and banquets. No wonder the Indian ways of cooking them seemed infinitely better, even when the cauliflower just became a vehicle for strong spices, more valued for texture and tenderness than its own taste.
That is certainly how it is with probably the aloo-gobi that was immortalised, rather dismissively, in Gurinder Chadha's football film with the line: "Anyone can cook aloo-gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?" But it was my memory of another Indian cuisine that did wonders with cauliflower that made me wonder if there was more to the veggie. This was the Gujarati Jain food that I remembered eating at the home of family friends who took amazing pains to cut it. The father did himself with a delicacy that belied his large size, as he sat on a chair, not so much chopping as dissecting it into small florets, like baby cauliflowers themselves. The reason for this, I was told, was to remove the tiny insects that crawl deep inside the cauliflower heads, which others may ignore, but Jains cannot.
These cauliflower fragments were then very simply cooked, perhaps just tossed in hot oil with salt and jeera, but they had a wonderful, buoyant flavour. This may have been because such small pieces only needed light cooking, but I've also learned that the cutting may have played a role. All the brassicas, the vegetable family that includes cauliflowers, have pungent chemical defenses that come out when their plant cells are cut or crushed - mustard has the most, but cabbage and others do too. Cauliflower is the calmest of this family, but it has the chemicals in a mild form, and the careful cutting would have helped develop them, giving the final dish its fine, full flavour.
Much as I like this, I don't really have the patience to do it, which is why I've been happy to find ways of cooking that neither overcook nor drown the cauliflowers in spices, allowing its subtle, sweet and earthy flavours to come out. Slow roasting is one way, after tossing the chunks in oil, salt, lots of pepper and perhaps a little sugar, to help develop the caramelisation that comes in cooking. This makes for a great tasting and fairly healthy party snack, and the leftovers are good for munching the next day.
Another trick is to boil cauliflower chunks in milk till tender, then fry in butter till they brown and make it all into a puree that tastes as good, if not better, than mashed potatoes. But perhaps the best thing to do is to make sure the cauliflower you buy is really fresh. Because it seems to last well, hawkers often keep them on their stands for days, but if you try one that was picked just a little while back, you will realise all the flavours that get lost with time. Now that I think about it, that was probably the secret of those Kolkata cauliflowers, grown on the fields outside the city and brought to be sold really fresh on the road to Dum Dum.
Vikram Doctor ETCD1210504
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