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Cauliflower Au Gratin
1 large cauliflower 1 ounce brown bread crumbs 1 ounce butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 gill milk 3 ounces grated cheese Pepper and salt to taste Clean, and partly boil the cauliflower, and drain it well. Make a sauce as follows: Melt the butter in a saucepan, stir in the flour, pour the milk in, and let it boil for ten minutes, stirring all the time; then add the cheese and pepper. Pour this sauce over the cauliflower, broken into flowerets, sprinkle the bread crumbs on top, and put into a Dutch oven for fifteen minutes, until browned all over. It must be served very hot.
A straightforward cheese sauce over parboiled cauliflower, written for a coal range and a reflecting oven. The proportions are British, and one of them needs interpreting.
- A gillIn British books a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or about 2/3 cup. American writers of the same period often used 4 fl oz. Either way this is a very small amount of milk for a tablespoon of flour plus 3 ounces of cheese, so expect a paste rather than a pourable sauce; a full cup of milk gives something closer to what a modern cook means by cheese sauce.
- Dutch ovenIn British books of this period this generally means a tin reflecting oven stood in front of the fire to brown the top, rather than the heavy lidded casserole sold under that name now. A hot oven, or a few minutes under a broiler with a close eye on it, will do the same job.
- Boil the sauce ten minutesTen minutes of hard boiling is longer than needed and will thicken it to a putty at this milk-to-flour ratio. Two to three minutes at a simmer cooks out the raw flour taste. Add the cheese off the heat so it melts without turning grainy or oily.
- Partly boil the cauliflowerFive or six minutes in salted water for florets, so they still hold their shape. Drain thoroughly and let the steam escape, or the water will thin the sauce and pool in the dish.
- Brown bread crumbsThis may mean crumbs of brown bread, or dried crumbs from bread baked hard and rolled; either is drier and coarser than fresh white crumbs. Any dry crumb works; tossing them with a little melted butter helps them colour evenly.
- The cheeseAn English cook would most likely have reached for Cheddar or Cheshire. A sharp Cheddar at 3 ounces, roughly 3/4 cup grated, suits it; the recipe salts to taste because the cheese carries much of the seasoning.
- YieldOne large cauliflower serves about four as a side dish, or two if it is the whole of the dish.
Cheese figured heavily in meatless cookery, and cauliflower au gratin was one of its most reliable workhorses, simple enough that it asked nothing unfamiliar of a household. Au gratin refers not to cheese but to the browned crust itself, the gratin being, by the standard explanation, the crisp scraping from the surface of the dish. Placing such a dish among meat substitutes reflects the nutritional thinking of the day, when cheese, eggs and pulses were catalogued as protein stand-ins for households observing Lent, vegetarian principle, or economy. The instruction to serve it very hot is not incidental: a cheese sauce this thick sets stiff as it cools.