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Cauliflowers with Parmesan Cheese
Take a cauliflower and break it into tufts, wash these thoroughly and put them into salted boiling water, but do not allow them to cook too soft. When cooked put each piece into warmed butter first and then strain them into grated Parmesan cheese, seasoned with dry mustard, pepper and salt. Place the pieces neatly together on a dish, pour over a little warmed butter, and bake in a hot oven for five minutes. When done, serve immediately.
A straightforward gratin of boiled cauliflower rolled in butter and cheese, finished under high heat. The only real pitfalls are overcooking the florets and misreading the odd wording in the middle of the recipe.
- The hinge: undercook the cauliflowerThe florets get a second heating in the oven, so boil them only until a knife tip meets slight resistance — roughly 4 to 6 minutes for medium tufts. Cauliflower that is already tender at the boil collapses into wet mush after five minutes in a hot oven.
- "Strain them into grated Parmesan"This means drain off the excess butter and toss the pieces in the seasoned cheese so it clings. Lift each floret out of the butter with a fork or slotted spoon, let it stop dripping, then roll it in the cheese mixture.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 425–450°F as a modern equivalent; the recipe itself gives no temperature. At that heat five minutes is enough to melt the cheese and take colour. A broiler for two or three minutes will do much the same job, though the recipe specifies baking.
- "Warmed butter"Melted, not browned and not foaming. Butter taken too far will fry the cheese coating rather than let it set on the surface.
- Dry mustardEnglish-style mustard powder, and the quantity is left entirely to the cook; the recipe specifies none. Roughly half a teaspoon to a cup of grated Parmesan works. It sharpens the cheese rather than reading as mustard.
- ParmesanGrate it fine from a block; the pre-grated tubs contain anti-caking agents and will not melt smoothly onto the florets.
- SaltSeason the boiling water well, but go light on the added salt in the cheese mixture — Parmesan brings a good deal of its own.
- YieldOne medium head serves four as a side dish. Use a shallow gratin dish so the pieces sit in a single layer and colour evenly.
Cauliflower dressed with butter and grated cheese is often said to have been a familiar item of nineteenth-century restaurant cookery, sitting somewhere between the French *au gratin* treatments and the plainer English boiled vegetable with a cheese sauce. What marks this version is that there is no sauce at all: the cheese is a dry coating, held on by butter and fixed by a brief blast of heat, which keeps the florets distinct rather than sunk in béchamel. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, compiled his 1896 book from the hotel's working repertoire, and this is one of its vegetable dishes. The dry mustard is a period touch that appears again and again in English and American cheese cookery of the era, from Welsh rarebit onward, on the principle that it lifts cheese without announcing itself.