Home › Vegetables › Cauliflower Au Gratin
Cauliflower Au Gratin
Break boiled cauliflower into small flowerets; place in layers in a buttered pudding dish, covering each with cream sauce and grated cheese. Spread buttered bread crumbs over the top of the dish and bake until brown.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in loose-leaf books, where the cream sauce was assumed knowledge. The quantities and oven are left entirely to the cook.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 400F on an upper rack for 20-25 minutes, until the crumbs colour and the sauce bubbles at the edges. The dish only needs browning, since everything in it is already cooked.
- Cream sauceHere a white sauce of butter, flour and milk or cream; commonly equal parts butter and flour, about 2 tablespoons each to a cup of liquid, though books of the period vary. Make it slightly looser than you want the finished dish, as the cauliflower will not thin it much and it firms in the oven.
- Do not overboil the cauliflowerThis is the hinge. Boil the head only until a knife slips into the stem with slight resistance, roughly 6-8 minutes for florets, then drain thoroughly. Cauliflower cooked soft before it goes into the oven collapses into wet pulp and waters down the sauce.
- Drying mattersLet the drained florets sit in the colander or on a towel for a few minutes. Surface water is the usual reason a gratin turns out soupy.
- Pudding dishA deep round or oval baking dish, close to a modern 1.5- to 2-quart casserole. A shallower dish gives a better crumb-to-vegetable ratio.
- CheeseUnspecified in the recipe; in American books of this kind grated cheese usually means a firm, dryish cheddar. Gruyere or Parmesan also work, and Parmesan in particular browns readily.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh coarse crumbs with melted butter, about 2 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs, so they brown rather than scorch in patches.
- YieldOne medium head, about 2 pounds as bought, with 2 cups of sauce and a cup of cheese, serves four to six as a side.
Au gratin means simply "with a crust" -- the French gratin is generally traced to the browned surface scraped from the dish, and the term came into English cookery writing as a shorthand for anything baked under crumbs or cheese. Cauliflower took to it particularly well in American home cooking, where a white sauce and a cheese crust made it dinner-worthy. Loose-leaf cook books like this one were sold as binders so that cooks could add pages and their own cards, which may account for the terseness here.