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Cauliflower Soup

A creamy cauliflower soup made with milk, butter, flour, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Cauliflower Soup

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and break the cauliflower into pieces, keeping the flowers whole.

Cook the soup

  1. Boil the cauliflower in 1½ pints of water with the butter, nutmeg, and seasoning until tender.

  2. Add the milk and bring to a boil.

  3. Smooth the wheat flour with a little cold water, then add it to thicken the soup.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice and serve with toasted bread.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 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 body of the soup and gives its main vegetable flavour.
Milk
Adds richness and creaminess to the soup.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rounded mouthfeel and flavour.
Fine wheat flour
Thickens the soup as its starch swells when heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the soup.

The step that matters

Smoothing the flour before adding it. Flour added dry or unsmoothed clumps into lumps that do not dissolve. Mixing it with cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens the soup smoothly when heated.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, wheat, flour, pepper, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, wheat, flour, pepper, nutmeg, 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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