Cauliflower cheese ... with bacon!

Believe it or not, in the first of our two pubs this used to be one of the most popular dishes!  Served with crusty bread, it was a tasty, filling and comforting meal with a very small price tag.  I think the fact that it harked back to another era (along with childhood memories) was also significant, as many people seem to like eating traditional British food when sitting in a traditional British pub.

We didn't have any crusty bread last night, so we had a tiny portion of oven chips and a couple of battered onion rings ... just to soak up all that cheese sauce, you understand!  So ... I steamed the cauliflower and grilled the bacon while making the cheese sauce, then put it all in a shallow oven-proof dish and grated a bit more cheese on top, and gave it 5-10mins in a hot oven.  It was lush!

V  Well, it's obvious really, isn't it?  Cauliflower cheese (without the bacon!) used to be the only thing carnivores could offer vegetarian friends to eat ... oh, and the ubiquitous cheese omelette, of course!