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Scalloped Cauliflower with Egg
1 medium cauliflower 2 cooked eggs Salt and pepper 1 1/2 cups medium white sauce Bread-crums Break the head into small flowerets and cook in boiling water. Add salt just before cooking is completed. Drain. Grease a baking-dish and place a layer of cauliflower in it, then a layer of sliced eggs, then a layer of white sauce. Put a layer of crums over the top and bake in a hot oven until brown. Four tablespoons of grated cheese may be used instead of the hard-cooked eggs. A bit of cayenne pepper may be added for additional seasoning.
A plain scallop of the kind that filled the vegetable chapters of interwar cookbooks: boiled cauliflower, white sauce, crumbs, browned in a hot oven. The points below fill in the quantities and temperatures the original assumes you know.
- Do not overboil the cauliflowerIt goes into a hot oven afterward, so cook the florets only until a knife meets slight resistance, about 5 to 7 minutes in boiling water. Fully tender florets collapse into mush under the sauce.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400 to 450F in the usage of the period. The dish is already cooked through; the oven's only job is to brown the crumbs and heat the sauce, which should take something like 15 to 20 minutes.
- Medium white sauceThe standard proportion of the period is 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk. For 1 1/2 cups, use 3 tablespoons each and 1 1/2 cups milk. Season it well, since the cauliflower brings none of its own.
- "Cooked eggs"Hard-cooked, shelled and sliced. Two eggs is a light layer for a medium head; three is not excessive.
- "Crums"Dry breadcrumbs; a variant spelling of "crumbs." Toss them with a tablespoon or two of melted butter before scattering them on top or they will scorch in patches rather than brown evenly.
- Salting at the endThe recipe holds the salt until the cooking is nearly finished. Salting the water from the start is fine and seasons the florets better.
- The cheese variationFour tablespoons of grated cheese in place of the eggs works best stirred into the hot white sauce rather than layered dry, where it can turn stringy over the crumbs.
- YieldA medium head serves four as a side dish. Use a shallow baking dish of about 1 1/2 quarts so there is plenty of surface for browning.
Scalloped vegetables were a fixture of American home cooking in the 1920s, when The New Delineator Recipes was issued by the Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and the Delineator magazine. "Scalloped" by then meant almost anything layered with a sauce and baked under crumbs, and a competent white sauce was treated as a basic skill rather than a recipe worth repeating: cookbooks of the era give it once and then refer back to "thin," "medium" and "thick" as if to standard sizes.