Cheese Sauce
3 tablespoons butter. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
Few grains cayenne. 1½ cups hot milk. 1/2 cup cheese cut in small pieces.
PROCESS: Melt butter in a sauce-pan, add flour, mixed with seasonings, stir to a smooth paste; let cook one minute, stirring constantly. Pour on gradually hot milk and beat until smooth and glossy. Add cheese and when melted pour over cauliflower.
A plain flour-and-butter white sauce finished with cheese, meant to be poured over boiled cauliflower. Nothing here has changed except the cheese itself and how hard cooks now push the heat.
- Take it off the heat before the cheeseAdd the cheese once the sauce has thickened and pull the pan off the burner, stirring until it melts. Cheese held over direct heat in a thin sauce breaks and turns grainy, and the recipe's "when melted" gives no warning about it.
- What cheese was meantAn unlabelled "cheese" in an American book of this period most likely means a firm cheddar-type cheese. Half a cup cut in small pieces is on the order of 2 to 2 1/2 oz; grating it instead makes it melt faster and more evenly.
- Hot milk mattersWarming the milk before it goes into the roux shortens the cooking and helps it come together smoothly, which is presumably why the original specifies it.
- Cook the roux, but only brieflyOne minute over moderate heat cooks out the raw flour taste without colouring it. This is a white sauce; any browning shows in the finished dish.
- Consistency and yieldTwo tablespoons flour to 1 1/2 cups milk is a comparatively thin proportion by cooking-school standards, and the cheese thickens it further. The recipe gives no yield or number of servings.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon salt is modest for 1 1/2 cups of milk. Taste after the cheese goes in; a sharp aged cheddar can carry the salt on its own.
- Beyond cauliflowerThe same sauce will dress boiled onions, macaroni, or poached eggs on toast.
White sauce built on equal-ish butter and flour, thinned with milk, was the backbone of American domestic cookery once the cooking-school movement of the 1880s and 1890s standardised it into a memorised ratio that a housekeeper could scale up or down. Adding cheese to it produced the dish English cooks called cauliflower cheese and American ones simply called cauliflower with cheese sauce, and it was a familiar way to make a boiled vegetable substantial enough to matter on a dinner table. Cauliflower came in through summer and early autumn, and a sauce like this was how a cook made the week's vegetable feel like part of the meal rather than an afterthought. The cayenne, a few grains only, is a cooking-school signature, meant to sharpen the cheese without being tasted as heat.