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Cauliflower Salad

A salad of boiled cauliflower tossed with lemon juice or vinegar, French dressing, and parsley or wild sorrel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cauliflower Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the cauliflower

  1. Tie the cauliflower in cheesecloth.

  2. Boil the tied cauliflower until tender.

  3. Drain the cauliflower.

  4. Sprinkle the cauliflower with lemon juice or vinegar.

  5. Let the cauliflower cool.

Dress and serve

  1. Separate the flowerets.

  2. Cover the flowerets with French dressing.

  3. Sprinkle the flowerets with chopped parsley or wild sorrel.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Cauliflower + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Cauliflower + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together179 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 salad, cooked until tender and then served in flowerets.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavor of the cauliflower.
French dressing
Adds fat and acidity, coating the flowerets with flavor and moisture.

Swap the cauliflower

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Cauliflowerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, parsley. 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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