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Cauliflower to Boil

A 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 sugar work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 497 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Cauliflower to Boil

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the cauliflower and soak it in salted water for at least 1 hour.

  2. Trim the leaves even with the top of the flower, removing the coarser outside leaves.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the cauliflower head down in a large pot of boiling salted water with a pinch of baking soda or sugar.

  2. Boil rapidly for about 15 minutes with the lid off to allow gas to escape.

  3. Check for doneness by inserting a fork into the outside leaves; it should go in easily.

  4. Drain in a colander 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 + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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 softens into tender florets when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly with the lid off. Leaving the lid off lets the strong-smelling sulfur compounds escape, keeping the flavour milder. Boiling too long turns the florets soft and mushy, so checking with a fork matters.

“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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