Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Cauliflower
Cauliflower
Boil and drain 1 cauliflower and dredge top with pepper and salt, sprinkle with grated cheese, and pour little melted Crisco over it. Set in oven for 5 minutes to brown, and serve surrounded with tomato sauce.
A plain gratin of cauliflower, written to sell shortening. It works, but the two vague points — how long to boil and how hot the oven is — are the whole difference between good and grey.
- Boil, but brieflyPeriod recipes commonly call for boiling cauliflower whole for 20 minutes or more, which may be part of how the vegetable acquired its reputation. Break it into large florets and boil in well-salted water 5 to 7 minutes, until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain very thoroughly. Wet cauliflower will not brown.
- The oven temperatureNo heat is given, and five minutes only makes sense in a very hot one. Use 450F, or better, run it under the broiler for 3 to 5 minutes until the cheese blisters. At 350F you will simply heat it through without colour.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists to promote it, but melted butter gives a better crust and more flavour here. If you keep the shortening, use about 2 tablespoons.
- Grated cheeseThe book does not specify; a dry grating cheese of the Parmesan type is the likeliest reading for the period. Roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup for a medium head. A sharp cheddar works, though it will slump rather than crisp.
- DredgeIn this period "dredge" simply means to dust or sprinkle over the surface, not to coat in flour.
- Tomato sauceAn unsweetened cooked tomato sauce, thin enough to pool around the base of the dish. Ladle it onto the platter and set the cauliflower in it, rather than pouring it over the browned top.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish, or two as a light supper with bread.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911 — which explains why a simple cheese-topped cauliflower calls for melted shortening where a butter-using cook would reach for butter. The dish itself is a stripped-down cousin of the French chou-fleur au gratin, a standard of the period's vegetable cookery, here shortened to fit a book whose real purpose was to demonstrate that the new fat could stand in for butter and lard in every course of the day. Serving a boiled white vegetable ringed with red tomato sauce is a presentation the period's cookbooks return to often, suggesting that colour contrast on the platter may have done much of the work that garnishes and plating do now.