Cauliflower Salad with Crisp-Fried Chorizo Sausage and a Warm Lemon Dressing

An easy, tapas-style dish with sensational flavours and textures: shaved raw cauliflower with crumbled fried chorizo, crisp breadcrumbs, a whisper of garlic and a warm lemony olive-oil dressing. If you're on a low-carb, #LCHF or diabetic diet, leave out the crumbs and will still taste wonderful.

Cauliflower Salad with Crisp-Fried Chorizo Sausage and a Warm Lemon Dressing

I really like raw cauliflower when it's young, fresh, snappy and unblemished, and reckon it's an ingredient that deserves to be used more often in salads. This vegetable may have a college education, but it's not naturally gifted in the flavour department, so when you serve it raw it's important to give it a kick in the pants with some bright, zingy ingredients. The inspiration for this recipe comes from my version of Robert Carrier's Cauliflower à la Polonaise (which, gratifyingly, remains among the most-viewed recipes on this blog).

It's not easy making neat, thin through-the-stalk slices of cauliflower - there is only so much 'tree-trunk' available on individual florets. Use a mandolin, or a very sharp paring knife. Chop the pieces that don't have a stalk attached, and hide them under the prettiest looking slices.

An authentic Spanish chorizo or Portuguese chouriço, made with smoked red peppers, will give you the best results. These beauties - available at good delis - are not cheap, but you need only one sausage for four servings, and they're of much better quality than most local versions, which tend to be fatty and somewhat, er, flaccid. If you can't find imported chorizo, add a pinch or two of fresh paprika to colour the dressing.

And if you'd like some heat in this dish, add a pinch or two of red chilli flakes to the pan when you cook the garlic.

Cauliflower Salad with Crisp-Fried Chorizo Sausage and a Warm Lemon Dressing

1 young, perfect cauliflower (or two smaller ones)
1 good chorizo sausage (15-20 cm long)
3 Tbsp (45 ml) sunflower oil or similar light vegetable oil
a small clove of garlic, peeled and finely grated
the juice of a lemon
2 breadrolls (or slices of bread),  a day or two old [optional]
6 Tbsp (90 ml) good olive oil
a big handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley
milled black pepper

Cut the core out of the cauliflower and break off the florets. Using mandolin or sharp knife, cut the florets vertically into thin slices and arrange on a platter. Put a piece of kitchen paper on the counter. Cut off a third of the sausage and set aside. Peel the skin off the rest of the sausage and crumble the flesh (or dice into very small pieces).

Heat the sunflower oil in a frying pan, add the sausage bits and fry, over a moderate heat, for a minute or two, until they're beginning to crisp and darken. Crumble the bread into the frying pan - you need some pea-sized nuggets, as well as smaller crumbs - and fry until crisp. (The crumbs tend to carry on browning after you remove them from the heat, so take them off when they're a pale gold, and watch them like a hawk.)

Tip the contents of the pan into a sieve, drain off all the oil and spread them out on the kitchen paper. Return the pan to the heat and add the garlic and a tablespoon of the olive oil. Gently cook the garlic for a minute or two, making sure not to let it brown. Now add the lemon juice, all in one go, and stir briskly to dislodge the sediment on the bottom of the pan. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in the remaining olive oil.

Pour the warm dressing over the cauliflower and sprinkle with the fried sausage bits, breadcrumbs and chopped fresh parsley. Finely slice the remaining piece of sausage and arrange the slices on the salad. Grind over plenty of black pepper. You shouldn't need to add any more salt.

Serve immediately.

Serves 4 as a starter or side dish. 

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Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot & Glitter

A generous glug of South African Hanepoot adds sweetness and sunshine to this delicate lemony cream. Hanepoot (pronouned 'ha-nah-poort') is a much-loved sweet wine made from the ancient Muscat d'Alexandrie grape, believed by wine experts to be the one of the oldest genetically unmodified vines still in existence.  You can, of course, use any sweet dessert wine in its place, as long as it's not so old and noble that its perfume overpowers the lemon.

Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot and edible glitter.

I came across this recipe while browsing a cookbook that's become one of my favourites in recent years: Robert Carrier's Entertaining, published in 1977. It's not really old enough to be called a vintage cookbook, but enough years have gone by to make the book seem rather quaint, at least in comparison to the lavishly illustrated, self-congratulatory extravaganzas of the Nigella-Nigel-Jamie era (I'm not knocking these icons, but don't you loathe the way they drool, in print, over their own recipes?).

Still, this is a book worth hunting down, as are all of Carrier's books: it's packed with excellent recipes that deserve to be revisited.

'He was as influential as Elizabeth David or Delia Smith, and some argued that he was the link between them,' was what The Times had to say in his obituary. 'He became the leading populariser of the appeal of good cooking and helped to bring about a domestic revolution in imaginative, adventurous cooking.'

Until I saw this recipe, I hadn't heard of  Elizabeth Moxon - and found no trace online of a biography of this English cookery writer.  I was very pleased, then, to find that her 1764 cookbook, English Housewifry: Exemplified in Above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts, has been digitised and is available in plain text format at Project Gutenberg, or in its original form at Google Books.

From English Housewifry by Elizabeth Moxen.

Elizabeth's Georgian recipe (which is not, strictly speaking, a posset; it's more like a syllabub) calls for 'a jack' of white wine, and advises that you sweeten the cream with sugar, 'to your taste'.  Robert Carrier calls for dry white wine, and an unspecified amount of icing sugar. I compromised by using half a cup each of hanepoot and  icing sugar. Feel free to adjust these quantities, but take care not to add too much wine - your dessert will become too runny and won't set to a perfect, fluffy cream.

I have frivolously decorated the tops of these creams with edible pink cake glitter, in keeping with the Elizabethan taste for bedecking food with comfits, fruit-paste shapes, spun sugar and all manner of fancies.

Serve this dessert within an hour of making it, or it will separate.

Please note that this recipe contains raw egg white.

Elizabeth Moxon's Lemon Posset, but with Hanepoot & Glitter

300 ml cream
the finely grated zest of a lemon
the juice of a lemon
½ cup (125 ml) icing sugar
½ cup (125 ml) Hanepoot, or any similar sweet white dessert wine
the white of a large egg
finely grated orange zest
edible glitter

Put the cream and lemon zest into a bowl and, using a whisk or an electric beater, whip until the cream is thick and fluffy. Sift the icing sugar over the top of the cream, and then pour in the dessert wine and lemon juice.

Using a spatula or wooden spoon, gently fold the mixture until well combined.  In a separate bowl, whisk the egg white to a soft peak and fold into the lemon cream.

Pile the posset into stemmed glasses (a piping bag is the only way to do this without messing the edges) and top with a little orange zest.  Place in the fridge. Just before serving, sprinkle with glitter. Serve within an hour.

Serves 4


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Lettuce, Cucumber, Spring Onion and Pea Soup

A paradox in a bowl: this soup has a lovely, clean, delicate flavour, even though it's sinfully enriched with cream, and thickened with egg yolks. If you like a fresh-tasting soup, as I do, you'll love this one.

This recipe is adapted from Robert Carrier's recipe for Potage à la Bonne Femme, from Great Starters, a little gem of a book first published in 1965.

Of the nine soups Carrier included in this book, no less than three feature lettuce as the main ingredient. Having tasted this soup, I can see why: when softly stewed in butter and stock, the humble and unfashionable iceberg lettuce has an ethereal yet distinctive taste, as does cucumber, that most gentle of flavours.

Carrier's original recipe suggested chervil, sorrel or tarragon as a flavouring herb, but I used fresh parsley (I couldn't find any fresh chervil or sorrel, and I thought tarragon would overpower the dish).

This soup is a bit tricky to make, because the eggs have a tendency to curdle in the blinking of an eye. If you're not confident about adding eggs to hot soup, I suggest you add a little cornflour (see recipe) and only two egg yolks to the mixture, which will greatly minimise (but not eliminate) the chances of the soup splitting. If it does curdle, for whatever reason, strain the whole lot into a liquidiser and blitz until smooth - it will still taste lovely.

Lettuce, Cucumber, Spring Onion and Pea Soup

5 t (25 ml/25 g) butter
1 small iceberg lettuce, finely shredded
6 spring onions [scallions], white and pale-green parts only, finely sliced
250 g frozen peas
half a large cucumber, peeled, deseeded and cut into matchstick-sized pieces
salt and freshly ground pepper
6 cups (1.5 l) good chicken stock, heated
3 egg yolks (or two egg yolks, plus 1 ½ t [7.5 ml) cornflour/cornstarch]
200 ml single cream
3 T (45 ml) very finely chopped fresh parsley or chervil

Heat the butter in a large pot and add the lettuce, spring onions, frozen peas and cucumber. Season with salt and pepper, stir well and cook gently for five minutes. Add the hot chicken stock and simmer for 30 minutes, or until the vegetables are quite tender, but not mushy. Put the egg yolks and cream into a little bowl and whisk together until well combined. [Alternatively, see above, slake the cornflour with a few teaspoons of cream. Whisk in the remaining cream and two egg yolks.)

Add a soup ladle of the hot soup to the egg and cream mixture and stir well. Remove the soup pot from the heat and strain the egg and cream mixture, through a sieve, into the soup. Put the pot back on a very gentle heat and simmer, stirring constantly, until the soup thickens ever so slightly. Don't, whatever you do, allow the soup to come anywhere near boiling point, at which point it will curdle. Stir in the finely chopped parsley or chervil.

Check the seasoning and serve hot. Robert Carrier suggests croutons as a garnish, but I liked it just as it was.

Serves 4 - 6. Print Friendly

Cauliflower with Butter, Lemon, Parsley and Crispy Breadcrumbs

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." I think of Mark Twain's famous words every time I look at the curious 'brain' of a cauliflower, which I reckon is one of the world's most underrated vegetables, along with parsnips and celeriac.

Okay, I concede that overcooked, flabby cauliflower is just revolting - fartily whiffy, slimy, and stinking of boarding school - but a dishful of fresh, springy white cauliflower florets, cloaked in cheesy Béchamel sauce or a zinging salad dressing, or crunchily pickled with peppery spices, is just a joy.

I only ever make cauliflower cheese (or my cauliflower-cheese soup recipe) so I was interested to come across a recipe, in Robert Carrier's seminal seventies book Great Dishes of the World, for Cauliflower à la Polonaise. The combination of lemon juice and cauliflower had never occurred to me; but it works so well here, with plenty of butter, and crunchy fried breadcrumbs.

You can do this with a whole head of cauliflower, or you can break the cauliflower up into florets and coat them in the sauce. I took the picture above with a whole head, trying to be clever - like a cauliflower! - and then decided this was a ridiculous idea, as the sauce wouldn't be able to coat every chunk. I then broke the cooked head apart, tossed everything together, and served it up to the hordes.

Robert Carrier's original recipe calls for diced ham, but I don't think this dish needs it.

Cauliflower with Butter, Lemon, Parsley and Crispy Breadcrumbs

1 small, fresh head of cauliflower
1 tsp (5 ml) salt
a slice of lemon
2 extra-large free-range eggs
½ cup (125 ml) melted butter
4 Tbsp (60 ml) breadcrumbs (blitz a few slices of white bread in a food-processor)
the juice of 1 lemon
4 Tbsp (60 ml)  finely chopped fresh parsley
salt and milled black pepper

Fill a big saucepan with water, add the salt and the lemon slice, and bring to the boil. Remove the green outer leaves of the cauliflower and trim the stalk, and any brown bits.

Submerge the whole head of cauliflower in the boiling water and cook for 15-20 minutes, or until it's just tender and yields to a knife. (Cauliflower cooks beautifully in a microwave oven: see Cook's Notes at the end of this post.)

In the meantime, put the eggs on to boil. Fill a small saucepan with water and bring to the boil. Gently lower the eggs into the boiling water, and cook for 10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat, pour off the boiling water, and run cold water over the eggs until their shells feel cool to the touch. Crack and peel the eggs, chop them into a fine dice, cover with cling film and set aside.

Remove the head of cauliflower from the water and drain, upside down, in a colander over the sink.

Heat the butter in a frying pan. When it stops foaming, tip in the breadcrumbs and fry them for a few minutes, or until they turn golden brown and crunchy. Remove from the heat and stir in the lemon juice, parsley and chopped boiled egg. Season well with salt and pepper.

Put the head of cauliflower into dish, and pour the buttery mixture over it. Or - if you're not looking for a cheffy result - break the cooked cauliflower into florets, place in a dish, and coat with the butter sauce.

Serve hot, with extra parsley.

Serves 4 as a side dish.Cook's Note:

To cook a whole cauliflower in the microwave oven, put it in a deep glass or ceramic dish and add half a cup of water. Cover with a plate or lid and microwave on high for about eight minutes. Push a sharp knife into the cauliflower to test for doneness. If it feels crunchy and unyielding, continue to cook it in two-minute bursts, or until it is just tender to a sharp knife. At this point, remove it from the microwave, douse it in cool water for a minute, and set it upside down in a colander to drain. Don't allow the cauliflower to sit in its steaming dish: it will turn into an overcooked mush. Print Friendly