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Parmesan and Cauliflower
Boil a moderate-sized cauliflower in the usual way, and drain it well. Put a large table-spoonful of grated Parmesan into a stewpan, with a quarter of a pint of good white sauce, and let them simmer together for four or five minutes, then put in the drained cauliflower, and let it boil very gently for ten minutes. Put the vegetable into a hot dish, grate another table-spoonful of Parmesan over it, brown it with a salamander, or put it in the Dutch oven for a minute or two, pour the sauce over it, and serve. Probable cost, 1s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A simple gratin of whole boiled cauliflower in cheese sauce, from the era when vegetables were routinely cooked twice. The main adjustment is timing.
- Undercook the first boilThe recipe assumes the cauliflower is boiled "in the usual way" and then simmered a further ten minutes in the sauce. Boiling times in books of this period tend to be long by modern taste, so following both stages as written is likely to give a collapsing head. Boil until only just tender at the stalk, 6-8 minutes for a medium head broken into large florets, then give it 3-4 minutes in the sauce to take up flavour.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. That is a modest amount of sauce for a whole cauliflower; double it if you want the vegetable properly coated rather than glazed.
- Good white sauceBéchamel: about 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp flour cooked together, then 5 fl oz milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Season before the cheese goes in, as Parmesan brings its own salt.
- Salamander and Dutch ovenA salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the dish to brown the top; the Dutch oven here is the tin reflector screen set before an open fire, not the modern lidded pot. Use an overhead grill or broiler on high for one to two minutes.
- ParmesanTwo tablespoons total, grated fine (the recipe's first spoonful is a "large" one). Buy it in the piece and grate it; pre-grated cheese usually carries an anti-caking agent such as cellulose or starch, which can dull the sauce and brown less well.
- Drain thoroughlyCauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in its crevices. Stand it head down in the colander for a few minutes, or the water will run out on the dish and thin the sauce.
- Cost and yieldOne shilling was the estimate for a full head with sauce. The stated three or four servings holds as a side dish; as a supper dish on its own it feeds two.
Cassell's places this dish among its vegetable receipts because the cauliflower was a fixture of the British kitchen garden by the later nineteenth century, cheap in season. Parmesan, imported hard and keeping almost indefinitely, was one of the cheeses English cookery books reached for when a dish needed browning, alongside hard English cheeses such as Cheshire and Gloucester: it grates dry, melts without stringing and colours under heat, which is precisely what the salamander demanded. The technique of napping a boiled vegetable in white sauce and glazing the top is straight out of the French repertoire that shaped English household cookery after Carême and Soyer, arriving in books like this one stripped of its French name and reduced to a few lines with a probable cost attached.