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Cauliflower Boiled with Tomato

A boiled cauliflower served with a tomato sauce thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cauliflower Boiled with Tomato

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Soak the cauliflower in cold salt water for 1 hour.

  2. Plunge the cauliflower into salted boiling water and cook for 30 minutes or until tender.

  3. Transfer the cauliflower to a hot dish.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Bring the tomatoes to a boil, cook for 1 minute, then strain.

  2. Season the strained tomatoes with onion juice, salt, and pepper.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour rubbed into the butter, stirring until smooth.

Serve

  1. Break the cauliflower into uniform bits and pour the tomato sauce over it.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Cauliflower + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,113 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cauliflower + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together935 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cauliflower + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together91 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce as its main vegetable.
Tomatoes
Provide the acidity and body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it clings to the cauliflower.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and, combined with flour, forms a roux for thickening.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour rubbed into the butter. Adding flour directly to hot liquid forms lumps, because starch granules clump before they can disperse. Rubbing the flour into the butter coats the granules with fat so they blend smoothly, and stirring keeps the sauce even as it thickens.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, onion, pepper, flour, butter):

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, onion, pepper, flour, butter. 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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