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Baked Cauliflower
1 tablespoonful of flour, ½ cup of bread crumbs, 1 tablespoonful of chopped parsley, 1/2 pint of milk. 1 tablespoonful of butter, ½ teaspoonful of salt, I bay leaf, Wash the cauliflower, cut off the outer leaves and break the head into flowerets; throw into a kettle of boiling, salted water and boil thirty minutes. Drain, place in a baking dish.
Put the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, mix; add the milk, stir continually until it boils, add the bay leaf, parsley, salt and pepper. Stand this over boiling water ten minutes. Remove the bay leaf, pour the sauce over the cauliflower, sprinkle over the bread crumbs. Put here and there bits of butter, bake in a quick oven until the bread is a golden brown (about fifteen minutes).
A plain béchamel gratin from the era when vegetables were boiled to submission. The sauce and crumb topping need no changes; the boiling time does.
- Thirty minutes is far too longCauliflower florets are done in 5-8 minutes in boiling salted water — tender at the stem but still holding shape. Half an hour reduces them to grey mush that will collapse under the sauce, and drives off the sulphur compounds as a smell rather than a flavour. Drain well and let the steam escape before saucing, or the dish will be watery.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400F, the usual modern reading of the term. At that heat the crumbs brown in about fifteen minutes, as stated, and the sauce is only heated through rather than cooked further.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup (8 fl oz) in US measure; an imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour this gives a thin pouring sauce, which is what you want — it should coat the florets, not set around them.
- The parsley timingChopped parsley added to the sauce and held ten minutes over boiling water will go drab. Stir it in at the end, after the bay leaf comes out.
- Ten minutes over boiling waterThis step exists to cook the raw taste out of the flour and to infuse the bay. A double boiler prevents scorching, but a heavy saucepan on low heat does the same job in the same time.
- Bread crumbsFresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not fine dry commercial crumbs, which pack down and brown unevenly. Toss them with the dotted butter before scattering rather than after, for a more even gold.
- PepperCalled for in the method but missing from the ingredient list — a common lapse in these books. Season the sauce to taste.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of cauliflower; one head of about 1½ to 2 lb trimmed will serve roughly four as a side dish.
Cauliflower with a white sauce and browned crumbs was a common English and American treatment of the vegetable in the nineteenth century, sitting somewhere between the French chou-fleur au gratin and plain boiled cauliflower with melted butter. Cookbooks of this period often direct long boiling for vegetables.