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CAULIFLOWER (au Gratin)
Cleanse, trim, and quarter one or two large cauliflowers. Throw them into boiling water, and let them remain for five minutes; drain and boil them in plenty of salted water until they are ready. Whilst they are boiling mix smoothly together in a stewpan an ounce of butter and an ounce of flour, add a quarter of a pint of cold water, and a little pepper and salt. Let the sauce boil for ten minutes, and keep stirring it. Put in with it an ounce of grated Parmesan cheese and one table-spoonful of cream, and take the saucepan from the fire. Cut the cauliflowers into neat pieces; lay half of these in a tureen, pour a little of the sauce over them, and add the remainder of the vegetables and the rest of the sauce. Sprinkle a large table-spoonful of bread-raspings and another of grated Parmesan over the top, and bake the preparation in a hot oven until it is nicely browned. Serve very hot. Time to brown, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A plain gratin whose one oddity is that the sauce is thickened with water rather than milk, which makes the Parmesan and cream do all the work. The hinge is the cauliflower itself: two boilings as written will leave it waterlogged.
- The double boilingThe recipe blanches the quarters for five minutes and then boils them again until ready. One cooking is enough — boil or steam the florets in well-salted water only until a knife meets slight resistance, 5 to 7 minutes, since they will spend another 15 minutes in the oven.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. With 1 oz each of butter and flour that gives a very stiff sauce; loosen it to a coating consistency, and consider using milk in place of the water for something closer to a modern mornay.
- WeightsAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons, an ounce of flour a scant quarter cup, and an ounce of grated Parmesan roughly a third of a cup loosely packed.
- Boil the sauce ten minutesThat long a cook is to drive off the raw taste of the flour, and it matters here because there is no milk to mask it. Stir throughout and expect it to thicken considerably; add liquid as needed.
- Cheese off the heatThe Parmesan goes in after the pan leaves the fire for a reason — boiled hard cheese turns grainy and can separate into strings and oil.
- TureenRead this as a shallow ovenproof dish. Nineteenth-century usage covered a range of deep serving vessels, but the layering and browning here want something wide rather than deep.
- Bread-raspingsDried crusts rasped or grated to a coarse powder — dry, sandy breadcrumbs, not the soft fresh kind. Plain dried breadcrumbs or panko both work; panko browns fastest.
- A hot oven425–450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat browns the top without drying the sauce; if the cauliflower has cooled, give it a few minutes more or finish under the broiler.
- YieldFour to five persons, as stated. The recipe allows one or two large heads, so anywhere from about 2 to 4 lb of trimmed florets.
Gratins came into English cookery books from French practice, gratin being associated with the browned crust scraped from the dish rather than with any particular sauce. The listing of a probable cost — 1s. 2d. here — points to a readership keeping to a household budget, and the choice of Parmesan is worth noting: hard, imported, expensive by weight, but used in ounces because so little goes far.