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Cooking the Cauliflower

A simple boiled cauliflower dish seasoned with vinegar and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 888 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cooking the Cauliflower

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose a firm, white cauliflower, remove the leaves, and separate the flower into equal-sized pieces.

  2. Use a small knife to remove the stringy covering from the stems and any small leaves.

  3. Soak the cauliflower pieces in a bowl of water with 1 tablespoon of vinegar for 5 minutes.

Boil and serve

  1. Drain the water and place the cauliflower in a pot of boiling water with ½ ounce of coarse sea salt.

  2. Once the water resumes boiling, cook for 25 to 30 minutes, checking for doneness with a fork.

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 + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together888 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 dish, and its florets soften as they cook.
Vinegar
Added to the soaking water, where it is meant to help keep the florets white.

The step that matters

Cooking until tender without overcooking. Cauliflower goes from tender to mushy within minutes once it is past done, so checking with a fork during the 25 to 30 minute boil helps keep the florets firm yet tender.

“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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