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Cauliflower, Genoa Fashion
Take some cold cooked cauliflower, sprinkle with grated cheese, and put into a dish that has been buttered and strewn with cheese. Sprinkle bread-crumbs on this, pour butter over, then more bread-crumbs. Put the dish in a brisk oven until the top is brown. Probable cost. 6d.
A gratin built from leftovers, written in the compressed style Cassell's used for its cheaper vegetable dishes. Two things decide whether it works: the cauliflower must be dry, and the oven must be hot enough to brown the crumbs before the inside dries out.
- "A brisk oven"Roughly 400-450F; the term was never standardised. The dish contains nothing that needs cooking through, only browning, so heat from the top matters more than time. Fifteen to twenty minutes is usually enough; a few minutes under the grill at the end will finish a pale top.
- The cauliflower must be dryCold boiled cauliflower holds a surprising amount of water, and it will weep into the crumbs and turn them to paste. Drain it well, blot it, and break it into florets rather than leaving whole heads that trap water in the stem.
- Which cheeseThe book means a hard grating cheese; Parmesan or a dry pecorino suits it, though the "Genoa fashion" title is no guarantee of an Italian cheese. Around 2 oz (about 1/2 cup grated) is right for a dish serving four; a mature Cheddar works but browns greasier.
- "Pour butter over"Melted butter, poured so it soaks the first layer of crumbs. Roughly 2 oz for a medium gratin dish. Butter that is only softened will sit in lumps and leave dry patches of crumb.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not fresh soft ones and not the fine orange commercial sort, which burns before it crisps. Panko is a reasonable modern substitute for the top layer.
- Reheating leftoversCold cooked vegetables that have been sitting in a larder are the starting point here. Refrigerate the cauliflower promptly after its first cooking, use it within two days, and make sure the finished gratin is piping hot at the centre, not merely browned on top.
- Yield and servingHalf a large cauliflower fills a dish for four as a side, two as a light supper. "Probable cost, 6d" is the costing line Cassell's printed as a matter of routine.
Cassell's, like most late-Victorian English compendia, attached city names to dishes fairly loosely: "Genoa fashion" here signals grated hard cheese and browned crumbs rather than any documented Ligurian original. What it describes is simply a gratin, and the technique — butter, breadcrumbs, cheese, a fierce top heat — was borrowed wholesale from French domestic cookery and applied to whatever the previous day's dinner had left behind. Cauliflower had by then become a thoroughly ordinary English market vegetable, grown in quantity around London.