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Choufleur a LA Kare

A curry‑style cauliflower dish with tomatoes, coconut, and spices served over rice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 29,030 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, fish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and fry the chopped onion until soft.

  2. Add the grated coconut, curry powder, and herbs and stir well.

  3. Pour in the stock, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and season with salt.

  4. Simmer the mixture for 20 minutes, then strain it.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Boil the cauliflower until tender, then cut it into neat pieces.

  2. Halve the tomatoes and bake them for 10 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Warm the cauliflower in the strained sauce.

  2. Serve the dish on boiled rice, alternating between cauliflower and tomatoes.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,030 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together14,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Tomato + oniontop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together20,622 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Cauliflower + garlictop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanol (resin, flower).

  5. Butter + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,456 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cauliflower
Forms the main bulk of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it warms.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and gentle acidity that balances the rich, spiced sauce.
Butter
Carries the curry spices and gives the onion a rich, savoury base.
Coconut
Adds body and a subtle sweetness to the sauce.
Curry powder
Provides the main spiced aroma and flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the sauce, then strain it. Simmering lets the stock, coconut and spices meld and thicken slightly, and straining removes solids so the sauce is smooth enough to coat the cauliflower evenly.

Flavor stand-ins for the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cauliflower, tomato, onion, sauce, butter, garlic):

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Mangobetter flavor fit
  3. Lemonabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cauliflower, tomato, onion, sauce, butter, garlic. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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