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Cauliflower with Cheese Sauce
Select a medium-sized, firm cauliflower. Trim off leaves, cut off stalk, and soak one hour (head down) in cold salt water to cover. Cook (head up) until soft but not broken (about thirty minutes) in boiling salted water. Drain and place carefully in a buttered, shallow baking dish, pour over one and one-half cups of Cheese Sauce, sprinkle with buttered crumbs and place in oven until crumbs are browned. Serve in baking dish.
The one thing to change is the timing. Thirty minutes of boiling gives a waterlogged, sulfurous head; the rest of the method holds up well.
- Cooking timeA medium head, left whole, needs 10-15 minutes in boiling salted water, tested with a knife tip at the thickest part of the core. If you break it into large florets first it will be done in 6-8 minutes. Overcooking is what makes cauliflower smell like cabbage water, since the sulfur compounds break down further the longer it sits in heat.
- The hour-long soakThis was insurance against insects and grit in field-grown, unwashed heads. Supermarket cauliflower needs only a rinse, though a 15-minute soak in salted water is still worth doing with produce from a garden or farm stand.
- Cheese sauceThe book expects you to turn to its own sauce recipe. A workable equivalent for the 1½ cups called for: melt 3 tablespoons butter, stir in 3 tablespoons flour, cook a minute, whisk in 1½ cups milk, simmer until thick, then take it off the heat and stir in about 1 cup grated sharp cheddar with salt, pepper and a little mustard. Adding cheese off the heat keeps it from turning grainy.
- Buttered crumbsPeriod shorthand for fresh breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly ½ cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter. Panko works and browns more evenly.
- Oven heatThe original gives none. Use 400F and expect 10-15 minutes, or run it under the broiler for 2-3 minutes if everything is still hot from the pan.
- DrainingStand the drained head stem-down on a towel for a few minutes before saucing. Water trapped between the florets will thin the sauce into a puddle in the dish.
- YieldA medium head serves four as a side dish, two or three if it is the main vegetable of the meal.
Cauliflower under a cheese sauce and browned crumbs is close kin to the English "cauliflower cheese" and the French gratin de chou-fleur. The recipe treats the vegetable as a slightly special item, chosen firm and medium-sized, cooked whole so it could be brought to the table intact and served in its baking dish rather than portioned out in the kitchen. The instruction to soak the head upside down in salt water belongs to an era when cauliflower came from a garden or a market wagon and might well arrive with tenants; similar instructions appear in nineteenth-century cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic. Long boiling of vegetables was usual in this period, and shorter cooking to preserve texture and vitamins became the accepted American advice only around the middle of the twentieth century.