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Cauliflower with Tomato Sauce

A dish of cauliflower served with a tomato sauce thickened with flour and seasoned with salt and butter or cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cauliflower with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Rub the stewed tomatoes through a colander.

  2. Heat the strained tomatoes to boiling.

  3. Blend the flour in a little cold water and add to the boiling tomatoes to thicken.

  4. Season the sauce with salt and butter or cream.

Serve

  1. Drain the cooked cauliflower and place it in a dish.

  2. Pour the hot tomato 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Tomato + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Stewed tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the tomato liquid into a smooth sauce when heated.
Butter or cream
Adds fat and richness, softening the sharpness of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Blend the flour in cold water before adding it to the boiling tomatoes. Flour added dry or straight into hot liquid forms lumps that are hard to remove. Mixing it into cold water first disperses the starch so it thickens the sauce evenly when heated.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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