Skip to main content
Main

Cauliflower Au Gratin

A baked dish of boiled cauliflower topped with white sauce, cheese, breadcrumbs, butter, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cauliflower Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Butter a shallow pie dish well.

Assemble

  1. Add a layer of white sauce, then a layer of cauliflower.

  2. Sprinkle the cauliflower thickly with cheese and season with pepper and salt.

  3. Add more sauce, cauliflower, and cheese until the dish is full.

  4. Ensure the top layer is sauce, then sprinkle with cheese and bread crumbs.

  5. Dot the top with small pieces of butter.

Bake

  1. Bake until browned.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 gives it a tender, vegetable body.
White sauce
Adds moisture and a creamy binding between the cauliflower and cheese layers.
Cheese
Melts into the sauce and browns on top, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden crust on the top layer during baking.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches flavour and helps the top brown.

The step that matters

Bake until browned. Baking too briefly leaves the sauce hot but the top pale; the cheese and crumbs need enough heat to brown and form a crust, while the sauce must heat through so the layers set.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, cheese, bread, butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, cheese, bread, butter, pepper. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMacaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes