Floret

Floret (pronounced flawr-it or flohr-it)

(1) A small flower.

(2) In botany, one of the closely clustered small flowers that make up the flower head of a composite flower, as the daisy or sunflower.

(3) One of the tightly clustered divisions of a head of broccoli, cauliflower. or similar vegetables

1350-1400: From the Middle English flouret & flourette (a little flower, a bud), from the Old French florete (little flower, cheap silk material), diminutive of flor (flower, blossom), from the Latin Latin flōrem, accusative singular of flōs, from the Proto-Italic flōs, from the primitive Indo-European bhel or bleh- (flower, blossom; to thrive, bloom), from bel- (to bloom).  The specific botanical sense "a small flower in a cluster" (as in something like a sunflower), dates from the 1670s.  The alternative spelling florette has been obsolete since the seventeenth century; in Italian the word became fioretto and in Dutch, floret.  Floret & floretum are nouns; the noun plural is florets.  

Cauliflower and Stilton Soup

Ingredients

80 gm butter, chopped
1 brown onion, coarsely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1¼ kg cauliflower, cut into florets
¼ cup fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
1 litre of vegetable stock
200 gm Stilton, crumbled (for soup)
200 gm Stilton cheese (for toast)
1 cup full-cream milk
2 tablespoons double-whipped cream

Instructions

(1) Melt butter in a heavy-based saucepan, add onion, garlic and oregano, season to taste with sea salt and freshly ground white pepper, then stir over medium heat for five minutes or until onion is soft.

(2) Add cauliflower and parsley, then cook, stirring occasionally, for ten minutes. Add stock and simmer for fifteen minutes or until florets are tender, then reduce heat to low, add Stilton, and stir until well combined. Add milk and cook until just heated through.

(3) Ladle soup among bowls, top with a dollop of cream and serve with toast thickly spread with room-temperature Stilton cheese.

Serve with:

Small glass of Dry Sack Sherry before, glass of Pinot Noir after.

Floret fashion: Lindsay Lohan in an embroidered Valentino gown at the premiere of Netfilx’s Falling for Christmas (2022), Paris Theater, Manhattan, New York City (left) (the pairing of the gown with a metallic quilted shoulder bag was much admired) and strand of Delphinium in salmon pink (right).  The genus name was from the New Latin Delphinium, from the Ancient Greek δελφίς (delphís) from δελφίνιον (delphínion) (dolphin), the name adopted because the florets were thought to recall the shape of a dolphin’s back.  The name was chosen by the Swedish zoologist & physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778 and styled as Carl von Linné after 1761) who first codified binomial nomenclature (the system of naming organisms), thus gaining the tag “the father of modern taxonomy”.  The genus is within the family Ranunculaceae and in common use they’re often referred to by the Dutch name larkspur.