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Cauliflower with Parmesan Cheese
A small cauliflower 1/4 pint Plain white sauce 2 ounces grated Parmesan cheese Trim all the green from the cauliflower, wash it well, and cut the stalk so that it will stand firmly on a baking dish. Place it in a little vinegar and water for a quarter of an hour to draw out the insects; then put it into boiling water with a little salt. It will take about twenty minutes to boil. Try the stalk to see whether it is tender; it must not be broken. Drain it very carefully, and place in baking dish; a French fire-proof dish is the best, as the cauliflower can be sent to table in it. Make a quarter of a pint of sauce from recipe for white sauce. Pour this carefully over the cauliflower; then sprinkle the Parmesan cheese over the sauce, and brown it in a hot oven. Serve immediately.
A whole-head gratin that stands or falls on the cauliflower being cooked through but still intact. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: don't break the headThe point of the dish is a whole cauliflower brought to table upright, so it has to be tender at the stalk without collapsing at the florets. Test with a skewer into the thick of the stalk rather than poking the curd, and lift it out with two spoons or a wide skimmer.
- Twenty minutes is longA genuinely small head takes 10-14 minutes at a bare simmer; longer boiling can leave it soft enough to slump when the sauce goes on. Steaming, upright, is safer still.
- A quarter of a pintThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fluid ounces and a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. That is a thin coating rather than a blanket of sauce; make double if you want the head fully masked.
- A hot oven425-450F. You are browning cheese on an already hot dish, not cooking anything, so five to eight minutes is enough. An overhead grill or broiler does the same job faster and browns more evenly.
- The vinegar soakA quarter hour in acidulated water was advised to drive out the small insects that lodged in market cauliflower. With supermarket heads it is generally unnecessary; with garden or farmers' market cauliflower, cold salted water for ten minutes still works.
- ParmesanTwo ounces is a lot for one small head and is meant to form a full crust; the cup volume depends entirely on how finely it is grated. Grate it yourself: pre-grated Parmesan browns poorly.
- YieldA small cauliflower serves two as a main course or four alongside other dishes. Cut it in wedges from the top down so each portion keeps a bit of stalk.
Cauliflower dressed with white sauce and cheese is a familiar gratin in the French repertoire chou-fleur au gratin and by the late nineteenth century it had settled comfortably into English cookery as a standby of the meatless table. Its appearance here under "Meat Substitutes" reflects the logic of the period: a dish counted as a substitute if it was substantial, savoury, and rich enough in protein and fat to occupy the centre of the plate, and cheese was the vegetarian cook's principal means of getting there. The instruction to soak the head in vinegar and water is a reminder of how vegetables arrived before commercial washing and cold chains, and the note that a French fireproof dish is best so the cauliflower can go straight from oven to table suggests that flameproof earthenware and porcelain were becoming familiar in British kitchens.