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Vegetables Au Gratin
Prepare vegetables by either boiling or stewing them, or use any left-over vegetable you may happen to have.
Method I. Place cooked vegetables in a casserole or baking-dish. Pour over white sauce. Cover with grated cheese and brown in the oven.
Method II. Prepare white sauce. When done add 1/4 cup of grated cheese to each cup of sauce. Allow it to melt, and then pour it over the cooked vegetables which have been placed in a baking dish. Cover with buttered bread crumbs (made with butter substitute) and bake in oven until brown.
A method rather than a fixed recipe, and it works as well now as it did a century ago. The only real decisions are the sauce ratio and how you get the top brown without overcooking what is underneath.
- The hinge: the vegetables are already cookedEverything in the dish is done before it goes in the oven, so the bake is only about melting, bubbling and browning. The recipe names no temperature or time; a hot oven for fifteen to twenty minutes, or a few minutes under a broiler, is enough, and longer turns cauliflower or beans to mush.
- White sauce, in modern proportionsA medium white sauce of the period is 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Reckon about 1 cup of sauce per 3 to 4 cups of cooked vegetables.
- Cheese quantityMethod II's 1/4 cup grated cheese per cup of sauce is roughly 1 ounce, which is modest by current taste. Aged cheddar, Gruyere or Parmesan all work; add it off the heat so it melts without going stringy.
- "Butter substitute"This points to margarine or oleo, used in place of butter when butter was scarce or expensive; the recipe says no more than that. Use butter for the crumbs; nothing in the recipe depends on the substitute.
- Bread crumbsButtered crumbs here are fresh or dry crumbs tossed with melted fat, about 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs, not the fine dry commercial sort. They brown better and taste less like sand.
- CasseroleIn household books of this kind a casserole is simply an earthenware or glass baking dish, usually with a lid. Leave it uncovered for this, or the top will steam rather than brown.
- Which method to useMethod I gives a distinct browned cheese crust; Method II gives a smoother, more thoroughly cheesy sauce with a crumb top. Method II is the safer choice for watery leftovers, since the crumbs absorb some liquid.
- YieldA dish built on 3 to 4 cups of cooked vegetables and a cup of sauce serves four as a side, two as a light supper.
Au gratin means only "with a crust" -- from the French gratter, to scrape, originally the browned coating scraped from the pan -- and by the early twentieth century American household books had adopted it as shorthand for anything sauced, topped and browned. Its presence in a cook book is telling: this is a leftovers recipe, filed under vegetables but really a lesson in thrift, teaching a housekeeper that yesterday's boiled cauliflower or carrots could reappear as a dish worth putting on the table. The instruction to make the buttered crumbs with a butter substitute is the only sign of economy the recipe itself gives.