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Cauliflower with Egg
1 medium cauliflower
1/½ cups medium white sauce
2 cooked eggs
Bread-crums
Salt and pepper
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 straightforward gratin that assumes you already know how to make white sauce and how long cauliflower takes. Two details in the printed text need clearing up before you start.
- The garbled measurement"1/½ cups medium white sauce" is a typesetting error; the intended quantity is almost certainly 1½ cups, which is right for one medium head. Anything less will leave dry patches under the crumbs.
- Medium white sauceIn this period that means 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk — roughly the thickness of pouring cream. A thin sauce (1 tablespoon each) would soak into the crumbs; a thick one (3 each) sets into paste.
- Hot oven425-450F. The dish is already cooked through, so the oven is only there to brown the top; 10 to 15 minutes is enough. Watch it rather than timing it.
- CrumsSimply breadcrumbs, spelled as the book prints it. Dry crumbs tossed with a little melted butter brown far more evenly than bare ones, which tend to scorch at the edges and stay pale in the middle.
- Cooked eggsHard-cooked, sliced. Two eggs for a whole head is sparse by modern eyes; three or four distribute better through the layers.
- Don't overcook the cauliflowerThe florets get a second heating in the oven, so boil them only until a knife meets slight resistance, about 5 to 7 minutes. Fully tender florets collapse into mush under the sauce.
- Salting at the endThe instruction to salt just before the cooking finishes is a period habit, not a rule you need to keep. Salting the water from the start seasons the vegetable more evenly and does nothing harmful to it.
- YieldOne medium head, layered this way, serves four as a side dish or two as a light supper with bread.
Cauliflower under a white sauce and crumbs is the domestic descendant of the French gratin, and the formula had become a fixture of American cookery-school teaching — white sauce was the first thing a student learned, and vegetable cookery leaned heavily on white sauce applied to something. The hard-cooked eggs are a thrift device as much as a flavouring: they stretch a single head into a dish substantial enough to stand as a main course. The alternative offered at the end, four tablespoons of grated cheese, points toward what most kitchens now call cauliflower cheese, though that dish has its own separate English lineage.