Home › Vegetables › Cauliflowers with Parmesan Cheese
Cauliflowers with Parmesan Cheese
Prepare and dish up the cauliflowers. Put a large spoonful of Bechamel sauce into a stewpan with four ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, two ounces of fresh butter, the yolks of four eggs, a small piece of glaze, some lemon juice, nutmeg, pepper and salt; stir over a fire until it be well mixed without boiling; then pour over the cauliflowers so as to mask them entirely with it. Smooth over with the blade of a knife, and cover the top with a coating of grated Parmesan cheese; place them in the oven, and as soon as they have acquired a bright yellow color, put a border of croutons of fried bread round the base and serve.
A Victorian gratin of whole boiled cauliflower masked in an egg-enriched Parmesan sauce. The hinge is heat control: the yolks must thicken the sauce without ever reaching a simmer, or it will scramble before it goes near the oven.
- The sauce must not boilFour yolks in a small quantity of béchamel will set at around 160-175F. Work over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring constantly, and pull the pan the moment the sauce coats the spoon.
- "A large spoonful" of BechamelThis is a serving spoon, not a teaspoon, and the quantity is genuinely vague. For four ounces of cheese and four yolks, something in the region of a cupful of thick bechamel seems to be intended, though the recipe gives no way to be sure; too little and the coating will not mask the cauliflower, too much and it slides off.
- GlazeGlace de viande — veal or beef stock reduced to a syrup. A teaspoon of commercial demi-glace or a reduced stock concentrate does the same work; it is there for savour, not thickening, and can be left out.
- WeightsFour ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly 1½ cups loosely packed; two ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. Use real Parmigiano-Reggiano or a good grana — the pre-grated tubs will not melt smoothly.
- Cooking the cauliflower"Prepare and dish up" most likely means heads boiled until just tender, drained thoroughly and stood upright; note the recipe speaks of cauliflowers in the plural. Drain very well and even blot; residual water will thin the sauce and pool on the dish.
- Oven heatThe recipe names no temperature, only browning to "a bright yellow color": the dish is being coloured, not cooked. A hot oven for a short time, or a few minutes under the broiler watched closely, is all that is wanted.
- CroutonsSmall triangles or fingers of bread fried in butter until crisp, arranged around the base after baking so they stay dry.
- YieldOne medium head serves about four as a side, or two or three as a light supper course.
Cauliflower dressed with Parmesan and browned is one of the clearest marks of French professional cooking in nineteenth-century English and American household books: the béchamel, the glace de viande, the yolk liaison and the crouton border all belong to the restaurant and great-house kitchen rather than the farmhouse. The wording here is close to the style of Charles Elmé Francatelli and Alexis Soyer, whose recipes were copied and recopied through compilations for decades, so that a cook using a recipe of this kind was expected to have béchamel and meat glaze already standing in the kitchen. Parmesan itself was a long-established import in Britain and America, valued precisely because a hard aged cheese travelled well, and it appears in English cookery books of the period in gratins of this sort.