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Boiled Cauliflower

A boiled cauliflower served with coarse sea salt and drawn butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Cauliflower

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pin the cauliflower in a mesh net.

  2. Place it in boiling water and cook until tender.

  3. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and place on a napkin.

  4. Serve with drawn butter.

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 + 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 fat that complements the mild, tender cauliflower.

The step that matters

Cook until tender. Cauliflower must be cooked long enough for the stem to soften fully, since the dense core stays firm and bitter-tasting if undercooked. Overcooking causes it to become waterlogged and lose its shape and flavour.

“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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