Cauliflower Cheese: The Ultimate Comfort Food

If you need a new cheese-filled comfort food, then look no further! This baked dish is exactly what you need to warm up in the cold months. Read on to get a glimpse of what it’s like during the cold months at the London-famous restaurant Towpath – right before they close for the winter.

The following is an excerpt from Towpath by Lori De Mori and Laura Jackson. It has been adapted for the web.

All photography by Scott MacSween and Joe Woodhouse

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RECIPE: Cauliflower Cheese

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 litre / 1 3/4 pints full-fat milk
• 2 bay leaves
• 8 black peppercorns
• 1/2 onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 or 2 cauliflowers (about 900g/2lb in weight), outer leaves and tough base of stem removed
• 100g / 3 1/2oz unsalted butter
• 100g / 3 1/2oz plain flour
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 200g / 7oz sharp Cheddar, I use Montgomery’s Cheddar, grated
• salt and pepper

Procedure

1. Put the milk, bay leaves, peppercorns, onion and garlic all together in a saucepan and bring to just below the boil. Remove the pot from the heat and let the mixture infuse until everything else is ready to go.
2. Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Add salt, then drop in the whole cauliflower. When the water returns to the boil, boil for 4 minutes and then drain.
3. In the meantime, melt the butter and stir in the flour. Using a wooden spoon, stir continuously to make sure the flour doesn’t form lumps or stick to the pan. Cook for about 5 minutes so that the flour is cooked.
4. Strain the infused milk and start whisking in the milk slowly, a ladleful at a time. This allows the flour to cook while thickening the sauce. When all the milk is incorporated, stir for another 5 minutes. Taste to check that the flour has completely cooked out.
5. Stir in the cayenne pepper and half the Cheddar and season.
6. Cut the cauliflower in half or quarters depending on size. Place in a roasting tray so that it is very snug. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
7. Pour over the béchamel, sprinkle over the rest of the grated cheese and leave to sit for at least 20 minutes. You can also do this in advance and leave overnight in the fridge.
8. Preheat the oven to 210°C fan/450°F/gas mark 8.
9. Bake for about 20 minutes – you want the cheese to be browned on top. Once brown, reduce the heat to 150°C fan/340°F/gas mark 31/2 and cook for an additional 15 minutes.
10. Serve with a crisp green salad. I always serve the salad with a lemony olive oil dressing as this cuts through the richness perfectly.

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Sap Not Rising

When I was at university, I had a feeling I could never quite make sense of. It arrived at the end of every academic year, irrespective of whatever marvellous thing I’d planned to do with my summer holiday, and its intensity was directly proportionate to how hard I’d worked. What I expected, and what seemed perfectly reasonable to wish for after all that sustained effort, was elation. What I felt instead was its dull, lumpish cousin, deflation. On a more poetic day you might call it melancholy. The bittersweet sadness that comes with endings – no matter how anticipated or longed for.

While our closing date is set for the Sunday nearest to Guy Fawkes Night, the end of Towpath evenings is a moveable feast that has more to do with us standing on the canal with a finger to the wind than the actual calendar. Even ten years in, we are easily fooled by a few days of sunshine and can never quite fathom the sand running out of the hourglass and months of cold, dark days throwing a blanket over our shenanigans. We only truly start to believe it when we can feel it in our bones.

There’s a certain conversation Laura and I have every year when a warm September spell has the canal swarming with humanity. One of us says, ‘Do you think maybe we should keep doing dinners a little longer this year?’ And the other replies, ‘Let’s wait a bit and see.’ And what we see is always the same thing. A sometimes sudden, other times almost imperceptible shift in the season. Summer holidays are over, the kids are back marching along the towpath in the mornings on their way to school. There’s a certain nip in the air and the damp, musky scent of flowers past their bloom and leaves beginning to turn. From one day to the next, people start asking us when we are closing for winter.

We can all sense an ending, even if we can’t put our finger on it.

At this point, Laura and I usually start talking about how good it would be to keep some sort of weather diary, which would eventually become a kind of Towpath Almanac we could consult every year to help us chart our course. But we never do. In this we are more like the birds who don’t start flying south because it’s written in a calendar, but because some internal clockwork signals that the time has come.

Life is suddenly easier when we don’t have so many shifts to fill – it takes a lot of people to keep Towpath afloat through an endless succession of breakfasts, elevenses, lunches, teatimes, aperitifs and dinners. It doesn’t seem to matter how many people we hire, there will always be a sunny week where we know we’ll be rammed, and it’s all – but never enough – hands on deck. We careen through summer, our little Towpath like some tinny car on the autobahn, speedometer needle juddering in the red, until suddenly it’s over and we downshift to the saner rhythms of Dolly’s Nine-to-Five. This coincides nicely with the return to university of the handful of Towpath helpers who’d asked to work every hour god gives and suddenly have more important things, like particle physics or cultural anthropology, to think about.

Although we still have weeks before we tuck up for winter, there’s the unspoken feeling that whatever flowering and fruiting the year holds has mostly happened. The harvest is in. And we are tired. All that furious pedalling, however exhausting, created an energy of its own, and now that we’ve slowed down, its light has dimmed. And we feel a bit flat. A bit whatever the opposite of sap rising is.

None of this is helped by the last Sunday in October’s turning back of the clocks, that dubious gift that gives us a single morning’s extra hour of sleep in exchange for months of unnaturally (at least to those who haven’t been born into them) long, dark nights. The sun stays low in the sky all day, no longer even skimming the top of the buildings that face us on the other side of the canal. On a clear day, it still shines on Towpath for a few hours in the morning, then again for less than half an hour as it traverses a gap between buildings and, finally, briefly, just before dusk, which descends in the early afternoon and leaves the canal properly dark and desolate by the time we close at 5pm. If we ever needed our own personal reminder that we are on a moving planet, tilting this way and that on its journey around the sun, this is it.

It isn’t as if our customers desert us when the season turns. Bright mornings are still lively. Loads of regulars come for one last lunch. And then there’s always a handful of people who ‘discover’ Towpath right before we close, and are bereft at the thought of living without us until March. Their enthusiasm puts a little spring in our steps. But by 3.30 the canal feels eerily deserted. A bit of a wasteland.

It’s as if our whole workday has been compressed into something much smaller, and nice as it is to get out early, there’s something oddly dissatisfying about it all.

 

 

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