Name: Cauliflower with Butter Sauce
Ingredients: 2 quarts boiling water; ½ ounce butter; ½ ounce coarse sea salt; juice of 1 lemon

Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Cauliflower with Butter Sauce

Ingredients

2 quarts boiling water
½ ounce butter
½ ounce coarse sea salt
juice of 1 lemon

Directions

Trim the leaves from the cauliflowers and wash them.
Add the cauliflowers to 2 quarts of boiling water.
Stir in the butter, coarse sea salt, and lemon juice.
Boil quickly until the cauliflowers are soft.
Drain and serve.

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.

Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the cauliflower.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

“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.