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Cauliflower au Gratin
Boil the cauliflower. Melt a tablespoon of butter in a saucepan and stir smoothly in one tablespoon of flour, thin with half a pint of milk, stir until boiling, add four tablespoons of grated cheese, a dash of cayenne and salt to taste. Pour this over the cauliflower and serve hot. - M. F. S.
Baked Tomatoes, Creole Style Cut into two halves crosswise, six fine large tomatoes, place them in a buttered baking pan and sprinkle over them two green peppers finely chopped, one teaspoon of chopped onion, two tablespoons of butter in small morsels and a liberal seasoning of salt and paprika.
Lift the tomato slices carefully onto rounds of buttered toast, then add to the liquor left in the baking pan two tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of flour melted and browned, stir well with a wire whisk, add one cup of cream, let it boil up, then strain over the tomatoes and toast.-M. F. S.
Two contributions from the same correspondent, run together on the page: a cheese sauce for boiled cauliflower and a baked tomato dish finished with a brown cream sauce. Both assume a cook who already knows how long vegetables take.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a fairly thin sauce, which is what you want if it is to coat the florets rather than sit on them in a blanket.
- The gratin that is not gratinatedDespite the name, nothing here goes under heat after the sauce is poured. If you want the browned top the title implies, put the assembled dish under the broiler for two or three minutes, or in a 400F oven until it colors. Otherwise serve as written, immediately, while both parts are hot.
- Do not boil the cauliflower to deathPeriod recipes commonly called for fifteen or twenty minutes or more in open water, which leaves the head waterlogged and sulfurous. Six to eight minutes for florets, ten to twelve for a whole trimmed head, until a knife meets slight resistance. Drain thoroughly or the sauce will slide off.
- Which cheeseUnspecified, as usual for the period. Four tablespoons is roughly an ounce of a hard grating cheese. A sharp Cheddar or a mix of Cheddar and Parmesan suits it. Add the cheese off the heat and stir until it melts; boiling it in makes the sauce grainy.
- No oven temperature for the tomatoesAssume 375F. Halved large tomatoes with the pepper and onion on top want about 25 to 30 minutes, until softened but still holding their shape. They will collapse if you push them further, and lifting them onto the toast becomes impossible.
- "Butter and flour melted and browned"A brown roux. Cook the two together in a skillet, whisked, until it smells nutty and turns the color of light caramel, then whisk it into the pan liquor. Working it straight into the hot tomato juices without cooking the flour first will taste raw and pasty.
- Straining the sauceThe instruction to strain is deliberate: it removes the pepper and onion pieces and the tomato skins, leaving a smooth pinkish cream. Skip it if you would rather have the vegetables in the sauce, but expect a rougher dish.
- YieldThe cauliflower serves four as a side. Six large tomatoes, halved, gives six servings on toast as a lunch dish, or twelve halves as an accompaniment.
"Au gratin" properly describes the crust formed by browning a topping under heat, from the French gratter, to scrape, referring to the browned matter scraped from the dish. By the time American household magazines took the phrase up in the late nineteenth century it is often said to have drifted toward meaning, more or less, anything served in a cheese sauce, which would explain how M. F. S. can call this a gratin without ever browning it. The tomato recipe carries a different kind of label: "Creole style" in American cookbooks of this era generally signals green peppers, onion and a hand with the paprika or cayenne, a shorthand borrowed from New Orleans cooking and applied loosely to almost any dish that could take a bit of heat. Both recipes come to us signed only with initials, in the manner of magazine recipe pages traded between subscribers.