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Boiled Cauliflower

A boiled cauliflower served with a lemon butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Boiled Cauliflower

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the cauliflower

  1. Tie the cauliflower in white netting.

  2. Cook in boiling salted water for 25 minutes.

  3. Drain the cauliflower and place it in a deep dish with the blossom side up.

Finish and serve

  1. Prepare a white sauce by melting butter and adding lemon juice.

  2. Pour the white sauce over the 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 + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  3. 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, cooking to a tender texture while holding its shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and cuts through its richness.

The step that matters

Cooking the cauliflower for 25 minutes. Cooking for the full time without overcooking matters because too long in boiling water makes cauliflower soft and waterlogged. Draining well also keeps the sauce from thinning.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon. 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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