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Escaloped Cauliflower
Boil till very tender, drain well and cut in small pieces; put it in layers with fine chopped egg and this dressing: half pint of milk thickened over boiling water, with two table-spoons of flour and seasoned with two tea-spoons of salt; one of white pepper and two ounces of butter; put grated bread over the top, dot it with small bits of butter, and place it in the oven to heat thoroughly and brown. Serve in same dish in which it was baked. This is a good way to use common heads. A nicer way is to boil them, then place them whole in a buttered dish with stems down. Make a sauce with a cup of bread-crumbs beaten to froth with two table-spoons of melted butter and three of cream or milk, one well-beaten egg and salt and pepper to taste. Pour this over the cauliflower, cover the dish tightly and bake six minutes in a quick oven, browning them nicely. Serve as above.
Two dishes in one entry: a layered scallop for ragged heads, and a whole head under a frothed crumb sauce. The white sauce is the part that needs the most attention.
- Half a pintA half pint is one cup of milk, thickened with two tablespoons flour and two ounces (4 tablespoons) butter — a fairly thick béchamel. "Thickened over boiling water" means a double boiler, which prevents scorching but takes longer; a heavy saucepan over low heat works as well if you whisk.
- Cut the saltTwo teaspoons of salt in one cup of sauce is far more than modern palates accept. Start with half a teaspoon and taste, remembering any salt used in the cooking water.
- Do not boil it to death"Very tender" by period standards was likely much longer than we would cook it, which leaves cauliflower waterlogged and sulfurous. Five to eight minutes in salted water, until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain thoroughly — surface water will thin the sauce.
- Chopped eggThe eggs are hard-boiled, cooled and finely chopped; the book assumes you know this. Two or three eggs suit one medium head.
- Grated breadGrated bread is fresh crumbs from a stale loaf, not the dry commercial kind. They brown faster than packaged crumbs, so watch the top.
- Oven heatA "quick oven" is generally reckoned at around 400–425°F. The scalloped version, for which the book gives no heat at all, only needs to heat through and brown — 20 to 25 minutes at 375°F works, or less if the sauce went in hot.
- The six-minute sauceSix minutes will not set a sauce built on a whole raw egg, even in a hot oven. The second version needs closer to 15–20 minutes covered, until the topping is puffed and firm to the touch, then uncovered briefly to brown.
- Frothing the crumbsBeating a cup of crumbs with melted butter, cream and egg makes a loose paste rather than a true froth; whipping the egg separately and folding it in gives the lift the recipe is after.
- YieldOne medium head, either way, serves four as a side dish. Both are meant to go to the table in the baking dish.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio Methodist church circles in 1876, and its practical streak shows here: the layered version is offered frankly as "a good way to use common heads," that is, cauliflower not handsome enough to serve whole. Presenting a cauliflower intact, stem down under a browned sauce, was the genteel treatment — cauliflower baked with butter and crumbs or cheese was long established in English cookery — while chopping it into a scallop with hard-boiled egg and white sauce was the thrifty American answer. By this period escaloped (also scalloped) had come to mean almost anything baked in a dish with sauce and crumbs, which is how a nation of church-supper cooks came to scallop oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and cabbage alike.