Name: Cauliflower
Ingredients: 1 head cauliflower; Salt; Drawn butter

Why it works: Cauliflower and butter work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 823 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cauliflower

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower
Salt
Drawn butter

Directions

Remove the leaves from the cauliflower.
Boil the cauliflower in salted water for about 20 minutes.
Once cooked, pour a little drawn butter over the cauliflower 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.

Cauliflower + buttertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together823 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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, becoming tender and mild when boiled.
Drawn butter: Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that carries flavour over the cooked vegetable.

“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.