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Fritot of Cauliflowers

A fried cauliflower dish made by boiling, battering, and frying cauliflower florets in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and flour work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 569 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fritot of Cauliflowers

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the cauliflowers until tender, then cool and cut into small pieces.

  2. Prepare a fritter batter using the flour.

Fry

  1. Heat the lard until hot. Test by sprinkling flour into it.

  2. Dip the cauliflower pieces into the batter, allowing excess to drip off.

  3. Fry the battered cauliflower in the hot lard until golden brown, avoiding overcrowding.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cauliflower + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Cauliflower + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together463 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cauliflowers
Form the main body of the fritters, giving bulk and a tender interior once cooked.
Flour
Forms the batter that coats the cauliflower and browns to a crisp golden crust when fried.
Lard
Frying fat that conducts heat to cook the batter quickly and brown its surface.

The step that matters

Frying at the right temperature. The lard must be hot before the battered pieces go in. If it is too cool, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy; crowding the pan also drops the oil temperature, so fry in batches.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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