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Choux-fleurs À LA Sauce Blanche

Cauliflower florets cooked in salted water and served with a white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Choux-fleurs À LA Sauce Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose a firm, white cauliflower without blemishes.

  2. Peel and wash the cauliflower.

Cook

  1. Boil water with salt and flour dissolved in a little water.

  2. Add the cauliflower and cook until tender.

  3. Drain the cauliflower without letting it cool.

Serve

  1. Place on a serving dish and pour white sauce over it, ensuring it seeps in.

  2. Arrange the florets closely together, with the tops facing up, to resemble one large cauliflower.

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

Cauliflower
Forms the main body of the dish and becomes tender when boiled.
All-purpose flour
Dissolved in the cooking water, it helps keep the cauliflower looking white.
White sauce
Adds moisture and richness, seeping into the florets when poured over.

The step that matters

Drain the cauliflower without letting it cool. Cauliflower left to sit cools and loses heat and moisture unevenly, and excess water left on the florets can thin the sauce and make the dish watery. Draining promptly keeps it hot and ready to absorb the sauce.

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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