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To Fry Cauliflowers, Celery, Etc.

Battered cauliflower and celery pieces are fried until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and celery work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 488 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Fry Cauliflowers, Celery, Etc.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the cauliflower and celery in salted water until tender.

  2. Separate the cauliflower into sprigs and cut the celery into 3 or 4 inch lengths.

  3. Drain the vegetables and let them cool on a dish.

Batter and fry

  1. Make a batter by mixing the beaten egg with the milk and adding bread crumbs or flour.

  2. Dip the cauliflower and celery pieces into the batter twice.

  3. Fry them in hot oil until they are a light brown.

  4. Drain on an inverted sieve with a pan beneath it and serve.

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 + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together488 recipes

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

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Cauliflower + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together223 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Celery + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, 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 and carries the crisp batter coating.
Celery
Adds a firm, crisp-tender texture and a mild fresh flavour once cooked.
Egg
Binds the batter so it clings to the vegetables and sets when fried.
Milk
Thins the egg into a pourable batter that coats the vegetables evenly.
Bread crumbs or flour
Provides the starch that crisps and browns the batter in hot oil.

The step that matters

Drying the vegetables before battering. Surface moisture from boiling and cooling makes the batter slide off and can splatter in hot oil. Letting the pieces drain and cool well helps the coating stay put and fry crisp.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, egg, milk, bread. 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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