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Cauliflower, Sauce Blanche

A cauliflower dish served with a butter, flour, and milk white sauce seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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, Sauce Blanche

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the cauliflower

  1. Remove the leaves and stem from the cauliflower and cut it into florets.

  2. Boil the cauliflower in salted water until tender, about 10-15 minutes.

Make the white sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 1-2 minutes until golden.

  3. Gradually whisk in the milk, cooking until the sauce thickens.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and a splash of lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve the cauliflower topped with the sauce.

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

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Cauliflower + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,113 recipes

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

  4. Cauliflower + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Cauliflower + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together569 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 gives it its mild, tender texture when boiled.
Butter
Provides fat and flavour as the base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the melted butter into a roux.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens as it heats with the flour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour briefly in melted butter drives off raw starch taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding milk too fast or without whisking can leave lumps, so the milk should be added gradually while whisking.

Swap the cauliflower

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

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

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