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Cauliflower, Au Gratin
(Italy.) Wash and trim 2 fine heads of cauliflower, boil it in salted water, then drain it and arrange in a pudding dish. Make a sauce of 1 cup of white stock mixed with 1/2 cup of milk or cream, yolks of 2 eggs, and 1 ounce of grated cheese. Stir on the fire until thick, pour it smoothly over the cauliflower, dust thickly with crumbs and cheese, adding salt, and bake half an hour.
A custard-thickened gratin rather than a bechamel one, which makes the sauce the whole difficulty: two yolks in a cup and a half of liquid will scramble the moment it simmers.
- The hinge: keep the sauce below a simmerCombine stock, milk or cream, yolks and cheese in a pan over low heat or a bowl over barely trembling water, and stir constantly until it coats the spoon, around 175F. If it boils it is likely to curdle, and once split it is hard to bring back.
- White stockA pale, unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted. Good low-sodium chicken broth substitutes; the only salt called for in the sauce comes at the end, so taste before you commit.
- CheeseOne ounce is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup grated, which is modest by modern gratin standards. Parmesan or a firm Gruyere suits the Italian attribution; use more in the topping if you want real browning.
- Boiling the cauliflowerBreak the heads into large florets and boil 5 to 6 minutes, until a knife meets slight resistance. They finish in the oven, and cauliflower cooked soft in water turns to mush under a sauce.
- Drain it properlyLet the florets sit in the colander several minutes, then blot them. Retained water thins an egg-thickened sauce and pools in the bottom of the dish.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no temperature. Half an hour at 350F will overcook an already-cooked dish and risks splitting the yolks. Twenty minutes at 375F to heat through, then a minute or two under the broiler for color, gives a better result.
- Pudding dishSimply a deep baking dish. A shallow one is preferable here, since more surface means more browned crumb.
- YieldTwo heads of cauliflower serve six to eight as a side dish, or four as a light supper course.
Cauliflower has been grown intensively in Italy since the sixteenth century, and its route into French and English gardens is often traced through Cyprus and Italy, so a book of traveller's recipes would naturally file a cauliflower gratin under Italy. The dish itself sits between two traditions: au gratin is French kitchen vocabulary for anything finished with crumbs or cheese and browned, while the binding here is an egg-yolk sauce of the older sort, closer to a savory custard than to a flour-thickened bechamel.