Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Leeks
Baked Leeks
Trim off the fibrous roots and cut off the green stalks to within one inch of the white portion of the leeks. Place them in boiling water and soak for ten minutes; then drain, put them into a saucepan of boiling water with a lump of salt and boil for three-quarters of an hour. Put one ounce of butter into another saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of flour, stir over the fire until well mixed, then add one heaping tablespoonful of grated cheese and one half-pint of stock, season to taste with pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg, stir again and boil for two or three minutes. When the leeks are cooked, drain, place them in a baking-dish, pour half of the sauce over and stew thickly with grated cheese, dust a little cayenne over the top and place the dish in a hot oven until lightly browned. Remove the dish, pour the remainder of the sauce round it, and serve.
A straightforward gratin of leeks in a cheese-thickened velouté. The one thing worth changing is the boiling time, which belongs to an era when vegetables were cooked to collapse.
- The three-quarter-hour boilTrimmed leeks are tender in 15 to 20 minutes in salted water, less if they are slim. Forty-five minutes leaves them waterlogged and stringy, and they will shed liquid into the finished dish. Drain them well and press gently in a towel before saucing.
- GritThe ten-minute soak in boiling water is a blanch, not a wash. Whole leeks trap soil between the layers, so split them lengthwise to within an inch of the root end and fan them under cold running water first.
- Half a pint of stockOne cup. With an ounce of butter and two tablespoons of flour that is a standard medium white sauce, thick enough to coat the leeks and still be spooned round the dish.
- A lump of saltAn imprecise old direction; no fixed quantity is implied. Salt the cooking water as you would for pasta, but keep the sauce lightly seasoned since the cheese brings its own.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified, as was usual. Parmesan or a dry Gruyère both suit the nutmeg and cayenne; a heaping tablespoon in the sauce and a fair blanket on top.
- "Stew thickly"A printer's slip for strew. Scatter the grated cheese over the sauced leeks before they go in the oven.
- A hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" of the period is usually reckoned somewhere around 425 to 450F. The leeks and sauce are already cooked, so this is purely for colour: eight to twelve minutes, or finish under the broiler.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of leeks and no yield. On the cup of sauce the recipe does specify, a dish of this size will serve about four as a side or two as a light supper course.
Leeks were kitchen-garden staples in Europe long before they became restaurant food, and the gratin treatment here — boil, nap with a flour-and-butter sauce, brown with cheese — is the standard French handling of the vegetable. Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) is enormous, and entries like this one sit alongside dozens of other vegetable preparations, each written as a short paragraph with no yield given. The nutmeg and cayenne are period markers: both were routine seasonings for cream and cheese sauces in nineteenth-century professional cooking.