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Cauliflower and Tomato
1 cauliflower 3 tomatoes 3 tablespoons melted butter 3 ounces grated Parmesan cheese 1 ounce of bread crumbs Pepper and salt to taste Cook the cauliflower until tender, then pass it through a coarse sieve with the tomatoes, which have been previously skinned, mix in the melted butter, and add the cheese and pepper. Stir very lightly, and put into a buttered baking dish. Sprinkle with bread crumbs, and bake from twenty minutes to half an hour.
A gratin of puréed cauliflower and tomato, written before oven dials were standard. The instructions leave out both a temperature and, oddly, the salt listed in the ingredients.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderately hot oven, around 400F, will brown the crumbs within the twenty to thirty minutes given; at a lower heat the top may need longer to colour.
- Draining is the hingeCauliflower boiled until tender holds a great deal of water, and three tomatoes add more. Drain the cauliflower thoroughly and let it steam dry in the colander for a few minutes, or the finished dish will weep in the baking dish.
- Skinning the tomatoesDip them in boiling water for twenty to thirty seconds, then into cold; the skins slip off. Sieve the flesh with the cauliflower as directed, or pulse both briefly in a processor — but stop short of a smooth purée, since the recipe wants texture.
- Weights in cupsThree ounces of grated Parmesan is roughly a cup, loosely packed. One ounce of breadcrumbs is about a scant quarter cup if dry and fine, nearer a half cup if soft and fresh.
- The missing saltSalt appears in the ingredient list but never in the method. Season the purée before it goes into the dish, tasting first — a cup of Parmesan carries a good deal of salt already.
- "Stir very lightly"Take the direction at its word: fold the butter and cheese through in a few strokes rather than beating the sieved cauliflower smooth.
- Crumbs and browningDry crumbs alone can scorch before the interior heats. Toss them with a little of the melted butter, holding some back from the purée for the purpose.
- YieldNo yield is given. A medium cauliflower with three tomatoes makes about four servings as a side, or two to three as a light main course.
Meatless cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leaned hard on cheese, and this recipe shows why: its claim to substitute rests almost entirely on three ounces of Parmesan, the one ingredient in the list with real protein and savoury depth. The pattern — a vegetable purée bound with butter, enriched with hard cheese, crumbed and baked — follows the gratin technique of French domestic cooking, and it delivers the browned, sizzling surface that a roast otherwise supplied at the centre of a meal. Cookbooks of this kind were written for Lenten tables, for vegetarian households influenced by the temperance and health-reform movements, and for cooks economising on butcher's bills. Parmesan was a well-established import in British and American groceries by this period, sold in wedges.