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Cauliflower a La Maitre D'Hotel
1 ounce of butter 1 ounce bread crumbs 1 cauliflower Cook the cauliflower first, and pick out all the white pieces, and sprinkle them with bread crumbs, and put over them pieces of butter. Pour the following sauce over: 2 ounces grated cheese 1 ounce butter 1 pint of milk 1 tablespoon flour. 1 teaspoon salt
A cauliflower cheese under an older name, written in the telegraphic style of wartime household manuals — the sauce is listed but never explained. A few gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The sauce is the whole dishMelt the 1 oz butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute without colouring, then add the milk gradually and simmer until it thickens before stirring in the cheese off the heat. Adding cheese to a boiling sauce is what makes it grainy and oily.
- One tablespoon of flour to a pintThat is a very thin binding by modern standards, closer to a pouring cream than a coating sauce. For a sauce with more body, increase the flour and butter; something in the range of 2 to 4 tablespoons of each per pint of milk (a US pint being 2 cups) will give anything from a light to a properly coating sauce.
- Ounces are weight, not fluid1 ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 2 ounces of grated cheese is about 1/2 cup loosely packed. An ounce of breadcrumbs is roughly half a cup of fresh crumbs, or about a quarter cup of dry ones.
- Cooking the cauliflowerBoil or steam the head until a knife meets slight resistance, 6-8 minutes for florets, then drain thoroughly. Waterlogged cauliflower will thin the sauce on the plate. "Pick out all the white pieces" most likely means keeping the white curd and setting aside leaves, core and any discoloured parts.
- BrowningThe crumbs and dotted butter want heat to do anything. Assemble in a shallow dish and give it 15-20 minutes at 400F, or a few minutes under the broiler until the top is speckled brown.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" is left unspecified; a firm dry cheese such as an aged cheddar or a hard grating cheese is the safe reading. Two ounces is restrained; double it if you want the dish to carry a meal.
- SaltA full teaspoon in a pint of sauce is a lot once salted cheese is added. Salt the milk lightly and correct at the end.
- YieldOne medium head serves three or four as a main course with bread, or six as a side.
Maître d'hôtel in classical French cookery means butter worked with parsley, lemon and pepper, laid on grilled meat or fish — nothing to do with cheese sauce. In English-language household books the phrase was applied loosely, and turns up attached to dishes a French chef would not recognise; what is described here is essentially a Mornay, a white sauce enriched with cheese.