particular
purposes. There are almost none but what are good somewhere.

I cannot omit to emphasize here the fact that the fall crop should be
mainly relied upon in this country. It is a waste of time to attempt to
have cauliflowers head in our hot summer months, and until our markets
are better supplied than they now are with this vegetable, it will not
often pay to do much with the spring crop. The time may come when, as in
England, we may expect to have cauliflower and broccoli the year round,
but it has not come yet.

The chapter on cooking cauliflower should not be overlooked. One reason
why there is such a limited demand for this vegetable in this country is
that so few here know how to cook it. The methods of cooking it are
simple enough, but there are many persons who always hesitate to try
anything new, and as cauliflowers do not appear regularly in the market
these people never learn how to use them.

Those interested in extending the market for this vegetable will do well
to devise special means for introducing it into families not familiar
with it. The writer found that foreigners who had been accustomed to the
use of cauliflower in the "Old Country" were his best customers.

THE CAULIFLOWER.

CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN AND HISTORY.

On the sea-coasts of Great Britain and other countries of western
Europe, from Norway around to the northern shores of the Mediterranean
(where it is chiefly at home) grows a small biennial plant, looking
somewhat like a mustard or half-grown cabbage. This is the wild cabbage,
_Brassica oleracea_, from which our cultivated cabbages originated. It
is entirely destitute of a head, but has rather succulent stems and
leaves, and has been used more or less for food from the earliest
historic times. The cultivated plants which most resemble this wild
species, are our different sorts of kale. In fact this wild plant is the
original, not only of our headed cabbage in its different varieties, but
also of all forms of kale, the kohl-rabi, brussels-sprouts, broccolis
and cauliflowers. No more wonderful example than this exists of the
changes produced in a wild plant by cultivation. Just when the
improvement of the wild cabbage began is unknown, probably at least 4000
years ago. Of the cultivated forms of this species Theophrastus
distinguished three, Pliny, six; Tournefort, twenty; and De Candolle, in
1821, more than thirty. For a long time this plant was used for food in
a