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Cauliflower with Cream Dressing

A cauliflower dish served with a butter, flour, and egg yolk cream dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and lemon work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 179 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cauliflower with Cream Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Pick over a good firm head of cauliflower and soak it in cold salt water for 30 minutes.

  2. Cook the cauliflower until tender.

  3. Lift the cauliflower into a vegetable dish.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, rub together the butter and flour.

  2. Beat in the egg yolk.

  3. Gradually add some of the cauliflower cooking liquid until the mixture is thin.

  4. Pour the mixture into a saucepan.

  5. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the hot sauce over the cauliflower.

  2. Optionally, add a little lemon juice before serving.

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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower
Forms the body of the dish and is the vegetable being served under the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter and liquid.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps emulsify and thicken the sauce as it heats.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Egg yolk thickens only with gentle heat; overheating after it is added can scramble it, leaving a grainy sauce. Boiling the flour-based mixture also fully cooks the flour so it thickens properly without a raw starchy taste.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, butter, flour, egg):

  1. Raisinfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Coconutfits less well

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