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Cauliflower Gratin
For cauliflower gratin, cook a cauliflower in boiling salted water until it is tender. Then break into pieces and cut the flowery tops from the stalks, placing the latter in a baking dish. Sprinkle these with bread crumbs, grated cheese and paprika. Upon them arrange the tops and sprinkle them thickly with bread crumbs, grated cheese and bits of butter. Bake until a golden brown and serve in the dish.
A plain gratin with no oven temperature, no quantities and no timing — all of which are recoverable from the method itself. The layering is the point: tough stalks on the bottom where the cheese and crumbs can soften them, delicate florets on top where they brown.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Since everything goes in already cooked and you are only setting the crumbs and melting the cheese, a fairly hot oven works best; something in the region of 400-425F for 15-20 minutes will brown the top without drying the cauliflower.
- Do not overcook the cauliflowerPeriod directions to boil "until tender" often produced a softer result than modern taste prefers, and the head then gets a second stint in the oven. Boil until a knife meets slight resistance -- 6-8 minutes for florets -- and drain thoroughly, or the gratin waters out.
- Drying is the hingeBoiled cauliflower holds a surprising amount of water in its crevices. Let it steam dry in the colander for several minutes before layering; wet florets turn the crumb topping to paste rather than letting it brown.
- QuantitiesFor one medium head, figure roughly 1 cup fresh or dry breadcrumbs, 3/4 to 1 cup grated cheese and 2 tablespoons butter divided over the top. Serves four as a side dish, two as a supper.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese", which implies something hard enough to grate: a dry aged Cheddar or a Parmesan-type cheese will both do. A soft modern shredded blend will slump instead of crisping.
- Bits of butterDotting cold butter over the crumbs, rather than tossing them in melted butter first, gives an uneven mottled browning. If you prefer even colour, toss the top layer of crumbs with melted butter instead.
- Serve in the dishMeant literally, and worth honouring — the gratin loses its crust the moment it is spooned onto a platter and back off again.
Gratin is the French for the crust that forms on top, conventionally traced to gratter, to scrape, the browned part being what was scraped from the dish. Cauliflower was a well-established American kitchen-garden vegetable by the turn of the twentieth century, and cheese-and-crumb or white-sauce treatments of it appear frequently in cookbooks of the period. The two-layer construction is the practical intelligence of the recipe: the stalks need longer cooking than the flowers, so burying them under the florets lets them steam in the cheese while the tops take the heat and colour.