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Cauliflower au Gratin
Boil one cauliflower until tender. Separate flowerets and chop tough parts. Arrange in buttered shells, or ramekins with White Sauce, sprinkle with grated cheese, cover with buttered and seasoned crumbs, and brown in a quick oven.
A compact 1907 formula that assumes you already know the white sauce and the crumb topping. The gaps are all in quantity and timing.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. The dish is already cooked through; the oven is only there to melt the cheese and colour the crumbs, which takes 8-12 minutes. A broiler for 2-3 minutes does the same job if the sauce is hot going in.
- Don't boil it tenderCauliflower boiled to true tenderness and then baked collapses into wet pulp. Cook the florets 5-6 minutes in well-salted water until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain thoroughly — standing water thins the sauce and stops the crumbs browning.
- "Shells"Scallop shells, real or the china imitations sold for the purpose, were commonly used for creamed entrées. Any shallow individual gratin dish works; a single 8-inch dish is fine, though it needs a few minutes longer.
- White SauceA sauce of one to two tablespoons each of butter and flour per cup of milk suits a gratin; too thin and it runs off the florets.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in a New England book of this date most likely means a dry aged Cheddar, though period recipes also call for Parmesan. Any of the three works; use about 1/2 cup for a head of cauliflower.
- Buttered and seasoned crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, salt and pepper — roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/4 cup crumbs. Panko browns faster and may need the lower end of the oven range.
- The chopped tough partsChopping the stem and core and burying it under the florets is sound economy, but the stem needs a couple of minutes' head start in the boiling water or it stays woody.
- YieldOne medium head fills four individual shells as a first course, or serves two to three as a light supper dish.
Au gratin means, strictly, cooked with a browned crust — the gratin being, by the usual account, the crisp scrapings from the dish — and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had reduced it to a formula: white sauce, cheese, crumbs, hot oven, applied to almost any vegetable or leftover. The older service order, in which a small made dish came between the fish and the roast, is what such a recipe answers to; a portion in a scallop shell was exactly the scale intended. Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other confectioners' cookbooks of the era it surrounded its chocolate advertising with a complete general household repertoire — hence a plain gratin alongside the confectionery.