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With White Sauce

A dish of boiled cauliflower served with white sauce or melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cauliflower and sauce work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 463 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

With White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose cauliflowers that are close and white.

  2. Trim off decayed leaves and cut the stalk flat.

  3. Open the flower slightly to remove insects.

  4. Soak in salt water for 1 hour, heads down.

Cook

  1. Boil water with salt.

  2. Add cauliflowers and boil gently, uncovered, until tender.

  3. Remove cauliflowers with a slotted spoon.

  4. Let drain.

Serve

  1. Place in a dish and serve with white sauce or melted butter.

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 + saucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together463 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cauliflowers
The main vegetable, which becomes tender when boiled in salted water.
White sauce
Adds richness and moisture to the mild cauliflower.

The step that matters

Add cauliflowers and boil gently, uncovered, until tender.. Boiling vigorously can break up the florets and leave them waterlogged, while cooking uncovered lets volatile sulfur compounds escape so the flavor stays mild. Stop when a knife slides in easily.

“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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