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Boiled Cauliflower Served with Cream

A boiled cauliflower served with a creamy sauce made from milk, butter, flour, egg white, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boiled Cauliflower Served with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the cauliflower

  1. Tie the cauliflower in a piece of coarse cloth and boil in hot water with a little salt until tender.

  2. Drain the cauliflower and place it in a deep dish with the flower side up.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat the milk and thicken it with the butter and flour, stirring well.

  2. Add pepper, salt, and the beaten egg white, then boil for one minute while stirring.

  3. Remove from heat, squeeze lemon juice through a sieve into the sauce, and pour half into a sauceboat.

  4. Pour the remaining sauce over the cauliflower.

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. Milk + buttertop 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 bulk of the dish and becomes tender when boiled.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it a creamy body.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and flavour.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth white sauce with butter.
Egg white
Beaten in and boiled briefly, it helps set and lightly thicken the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling the sauce after adding the egg white. Egg white sets when heated, so it must be stirred constantly while boiling for one minute. Stirring prevents lumps and keeps the sauce smooth rather than grainy.

Swap the cauliflower

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

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