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Cauliflower au Gratin
From I large, firm head of cauliflower remove the coarse green leaves and soak, head downward, in cold salted water for an hour or more; this will dislodge insects or small worms. Drain, place in a saucepan stalk downward, cover with boiling water, add 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, and boil gently but constantly until the central stalk can be easily pierced with a fork. Drain, and with a silver knife cut the head apart into flowerets. Make a cream sauce with 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, ½ teaspoonful of white pepper and 1 cupful of milk. Butter a baking dish and fill it with alternate layers of the sauce and cauliflower.
With ½ cupful of fine stale bread crumbs mix a pinch of salt and 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Spread this over the cauliflower and place in a quick oven until browned.
A plain gratin that turns on one thing: the cauliflower is fully cooked before it ever goes in the oven, so the baking stage is only for browning. Watch the boil and the rest follows.
- Don't boil it to collapse"Boil gently but constantly" until a fork pierces the core; on a whole head that is likely to be 15-20 minutes, less if you break it into florets first. Overlong boiling is what gives the sulphurous smell and grey, waterlogged florets; pull it the moment the stalk yields.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. The dish only needs 10-15 minutes at that heat to brown the crumbs, or a few minutes under a broiler. Everything in it is already cooked.
- The hour-long soakHead-down in cold salted water was standard insect removal when cauliflower came from a garden or a market stall. With modern trimmed heads, 10-15 minutes is ample, and you can skip it entirely if you break the head apart and rinse the florets.
- The silver knifeSilver, not carbon steel, because untreated steel blades reacted with the vegetable and left dark marks. Stainless steel makes the instruction obsolete.
- Sauce quantityOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk is a thin sauce by design, meant to coat rather than bind. For a large head you will want to double it; a full 2 lb head can absorb 2 cups of sauce.
- White pepperHalf a teaspoon is assertive by current tastes. Start with a quarter teaspoon.
- No cheeseDespite the name, none is called for -- "au gratin" here means the browned crumb crust, not cheese. Half a cup of grated Gruyere, Cheddar or Parmesan mixed into the sauce or the crumbs is entirely in keeping if you want it.
- Stale crumbsFine dry crumbs from day-old bread, not soft fresh ones, which go pasty. Panko is a reasonable substitute.
- YieldOne large head serves four as a side dish, two or three as a supper course.
Au gratin is often misread in English cookery: the French gratin refers to the browned crust scraped from the dish, from gratter, to scrape, and originally implied nothing about cheese. Recipes of this kind, buttered crumbs over a flour-thickened white sauce, spread through American and British household cooking in the second half of the nineteenth century alongside the domestic-science movement, which favoured measured spoonfuls and a standard cream sauce that could be applied to almost any vegetable. Its economy is plain enough: a single head of cauliflower, a cup of milk, a little flour and the ends of a stale loaf make a substantial dish, and the crumb topping is a way of using bread that would otherwise be wasted. The instruction to soak the head against insects and to cut it with silver rather than steel are both reminders that this was written for a kitchen supplied by a garden or a market rather than a refrigerated shelf.