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Cauliflower au Gratin
Place a whole cooked cauliflower on a dish for serving, cover with buttered crumbs, and place on oven grate to brown crumbs; remove from oven and pour one cup Thin White Sauce around cauliflower.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know two things from elsewhere in the book: how to boil a cauliflower whole and how to make Thin White Sauce. Here is what it leaves unsaid.
- Thin White SauceIn Farmer's scheme that is generally about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour to 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper — roughly half the thickening of her medium sauce, though the proportions vary between editions. It should coat a spoon barely, since it is meant to pool around the base of the cauliflower rather than cling to it.
- Buttered crumbsDry fine bread crumbs tossed with melted butter; about 1/3 to 1/2 cup crumbs to 2 or 3 tablespoons butter is enough for one head. Panko browns faster and more unevenly here; ordinary dry crumbs give the even tan the dish wants.
- "Oven grate"The oven shelf, set high, in a hot oven; the recipe gives no temperature. The crumbs need four or five minutes only, long enough to colour without drying the cauliflower. A broiler works and is quicker, but watch it continuously.
- An ovenproof serving dishThe instruction to place it "on a dish for serving" and then put it in the oven presumes heavy earthenware or metal. Modern china and any dish with glued or painted decoration should not go under a broiler.
- Cooking the cauliflowerTrim the stem flat so the head sits upright, and boil or steam it whole until a knife enters the core with slight resistance, roughly 15 to 20 minutes for a medium head. Period directions often ran longer; a head cooked to collapse will not hold its shape when the crumbs go on.
- Drain it thoroughlyThis is the hinge. A wet cauliflower weeps into the sauce and the crumbs go soft within a minute. Stand it stem-up on a towel for a few minutes before dressing it.
- Sauce goes on lastPour the hot white sauce around the base after browning, not before, so the crumb crust stays dry on top.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish, cut down through the head in wedges so each portion keeps some of its crumb topping.
Au gratin means, strictly, finished with a browned crust — from the French gratter, to scrape, the crust being what was scraped from the pan. The American habit of reading it as "with cheese" came later; there is no cheese here at all, only crumbs, butter and a flour-thickened milk sauce. White sauce in three thicknesses appears in Fannie Farmer as a base formula to be memorised once and applied elsewhere, and the terse cross-referencing style of this entry suggests a cook who had worked through the earlier pages needed only the assembly. Serving the head whole and upright — rather than cut up and buried — was a deliberate bit of presentation.