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January 24
Menu: Blue Points Brown Bread Sandwiches; Broiled Squabs; Potato Croquettes; Cauliflower au Gratin; Asparagus Salad; Cheese Fingers; Spanish Cream; Coffee Cauliflower au Gratin-Boil 1 large cauliflower, drain it, and break sprigs apart. Arrange in layers in Criscoed baking dish, sprinkling each layer with cheese, seasoning it with pepper and salt, and little melted Crisco. When dish is filled pour on 1 cup white sauce, sprinkle top with crumbs and cheese, and let bake 15 minutes to brown.
A straightforward gratin, but the original assumes you already know two things it never states: the oven temperature and how a white sauce is made. Both are easy to supply.
- The hinge: don't fully cook the cauliflowerThe head goes into the oven already boiled, then bakes 15 minutes more. Boil or steam only until a knife meets slight resistance; note the recipe boils the head whole, which takes appreciably longer than the 5 to 7 minutes separated florets need. Drain it very well. Cauliflower boiled soft collapses into a watery gratin.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the instruction is really "hot enough to brown in 15 minutes." Use 400 to 425F. The dish is already cooked through; the oven is only there to melt the cheese and colour the crumbs.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists to promote it, but any neutral fat or butter works for greasing the dish and for the drizzle between layers. Butter is the better choice here since browning and flavour are the whole point of the top.
- White sauceA 1900s-era cup of white sauce means a medium bechamel: about 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it before it goes over the cauliflower, as the vegetable itself is bland.
- "Sprigs"Florets. Break them at the stem junctions rather than cutting, and keep them roughly one size so they heat evenly.
- Cheese and crumbsNo variety is specified; a firm grating cheese such as aged Cheddar, Gruyere or Parmesan is what the recipe wants. The crumbs should be dry and fine, not fresh and damp, or they will steam rather than brown.
- YieldOne large cauliflower with a cup of sauce fills a 1 1/2 to 2 quart dish and serves four as a side, two or three as a light main course.
- The stray textThe lines after the recipe are a fragment of the book's day-by-day dinner calendar, not part of the method. The asterisks mark dishes with recipes printed elsewhere in the volume.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to explain a genuinely unfamiliar product: a solid white shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, with no animal fat and no butter flavour to recommend it. The book's answer was a full domestic-science cookbook, complete with a month-by-month "Calendar of Dinners," so that a cook would find Crisco named in the ordinary dishes she already made rather than in novelties. Cauliflower au gratin is a good example of what the calendar was for. The technique is plain French household cooking, au gratin meaning simply browned on top under crumbs and cheese, and it had been standard in American and British cookbooks for decades before 1913; here it is quietly recruited, with the baking dish "Criscoed" and melted shortening between the layers where a nineteenth-century cook would have used butter. That substitution, repeated a few hundred times across the book, was the argument.