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Escalloped Cauliflower
Boil the cauliflower until perfectly tender, then drain and chop into small pieces. Put into a buttered baking-dish with layers of chopped hard boiled eggs and add the following cream dressing: Put into a hot saucepan two tablespoons of flour and two of butter, mix and add one-half pint of milk. Stir until thick, seasoning to taste. After pouring the sauce over the cauliflower, put grated bread crumbs over the top and bake until brown in a hot oven.
A straightforward gratin, but the 1911 instructions leave out the oven number, the yield, and most of the seasoning. A few decisions to make before you start.
- Do not overboil the cauliflower"perfectly tender" here means fork-tender, not collapsing, since it goes on to bake. Note that the original boils the head first and chops it after, so allow longer than you would for cut florets, and drain very well or the sauce turns watery in the dish.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period that is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F, though the term was never precise. At that heat the crumbs brown in roughly 12-15 minutes, which is all the dish needs since everything in it is already cooked.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. With two tablespoons each of flour and butter that gives a fairly thick medium white sauce, which is what you want here; thin it with a splash more milk if it seizes up before it reaches the dish.
- Making the sauceThe original says to put flour and butter into a hot saucepan together and mix. Cook that roux a minute or two before the milk goes in so the flour loses its raw taste, and add the milk gradually off the heat to avoid lumps.
- Season properly"seasoning to taste" means salt and white pepper at minimum. A grating of nutmeg suits this kind of sauce, and dry mustard or a handful of grated cheese would not be out of place.
- Buttered crumbs brown betterDry bread crumbs alone can scorch or stay pale. Toss them with a tablespoon of melted butter before scattering them over the top.
- Quantities and yieldOne medium head of cauliflower and three hard-boiled eggs suit this amount of sauce; it serves four as a side dish. Bake in a shallow dish rather than a deep one so there is more crumb surface.
Escalloped dishes -- vegetables or fish layered with sauce and crumbs and baked -- were a staple of American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the word itself is usually traced back to serving food in scallop shells before it came to mean anything baked in a shallow dish under crumbs. The Butterick Cook Book of 1911 was published by the pattern company alongside its dressmaking guides, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper who wanted respectable dishes assembled from a small vocabulary of techniques, and the white sauce here is the familiar flour-butter-milk foundation. Adding chopped hard-boiled egg was a common way to make a vegetable substantial enough to stand as a meatless main course, and cauliflower in particular was well suited to it because boiling left it bland and the crumb top gave back the texture the water had taken away.