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Cauliflower à la Parmesan
Prepare as Cauliflower au Gratin. Sprinkle with grated cheese before covering with crumbs.
This is a one-line variation, and it only works if you carry over the parent recipe: cauliflower cooked and broken into flowerets, bound with a white sauce, topped with buttered crumbs and browned. The cheese goes on the sauce, under the crumb layer.
- The hinge: don't overcook the cauliflowerBoiling times of 20 to 30 minutes were common in period cookbooks, which leaves it waterlogged before it ever reaches the sauce. Boil or steam florets 6 to 8 minutes, until a knife just enters, then drain very well — surface water thins the sauce and steams the crumbs instead of crisping them.
- What "au Gratin" means hereIn Farmer's book the base is cooked cauliflower in a buttered dish covered with white sauce (roughly 2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 cup milk, salt and pepper). It is not a cream-and-cheese sauce in the modern sense; on the evidence of this variation, the cheese sprinkled on here is the only cheese in the dish.
- Grated cheese"Parmesan" in an American kitchen of 1896 meant a hard grating cheese, usually imported and dry. Use 1/3 to 1/2 cup of real Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano, finely grated. Pre-grated shaker cheese contains anti-caking starch and browns poorly.
- Buttered crumbsThe book's buttered crumbs are stale bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, on the order of 1 cup crumbs to 2 tablespoons butter. Dry commercial crumbs absorb less butter and burn faster; if you use them, cut the quantity and watch the top.
- Oven temperatureThe parent recipe simply bakes "until crumbs are brown" and gives no temperature. In a modern oven, set 400°F and give it 15 to 20 minutes, or run it under the broiler for 2 to 3 minutes once everything is already hot through.
- VesselA shallow, wide gratin dish gives the crumb-to-cauliflower ratio the recipe intends. A deep casserole traps steam and softens the top.
- YieldOne medium head with a cup of sauce serves four as a side dish.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) treats vegetables as a system of interchangeable finishes — the same cauliflower appears boiled, in white sauce, au gratin, and here "à la Parmesan" — which is why the entry is a single sentence. The French name is a period convention rather than a claim of French origin; American cookbooks of the 1890s attached à la tags to dishes to signal refinement. Cauliflower itself was still something of a market luxury in New England at the time, so the gratin treatment was a way of dressing a vegetable that already carried some status. The buttered-crumb topping, meanwhile, is pure Boston Cooking-School: it appears over oysters, macaroni, scalloped fish and half a dozen vegetables in the same volume, a house technique as much as a recipe.