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Salad

Cauliflower Salad

A salad of cooked cauliflower flowerets dressed with French dressing and mayonnaise, served on lettuce hearts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cauliflower Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Soak the cauliflower in salted water for 1 hour.

  2. Cook in boiling salted water until tender, then drain and cool.

  3. Sprinkle with French dressing and set aside for 30 minutes.

  4. Sever the flowerets from the stalk, keeping their relative positions.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place on a serving dish and add heart leaves of lettuce between the flowerets.

  2. Pour mayonnaise dressing over the cauliflower and sprinkle with pimentos or parsley.

  3. Separate the flowerets with a sharp knife when 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 + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Cauliflower + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 salad, providing the bulk and mild flavor.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess, coating the cauliflower with richness and moisture.
French dressing
Seasons the cooked cauliflower with acidity and flavor before it is chilled.

The step that matters

Cool the cauliflower before dressing. Cauliflower must be cooked until tender but not overcooked, then drained and cooled; residual water and heat would thin the mayonnaise dressing and make the salad soggy.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, lettuce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, lettuce. 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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