Name: Macaroni, Boiled
Ingredients: ½ pound pipe macaroni; coarse sea salt; grated cheese; butter

Why it works: Cheese and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,962 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Macaroni, Boiled

Ingredients

½ pound pipe macaroni
coarse sea salt
grated cheese
butter

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Break the macaroni into small pieces.
Boil salted water and add the macaroni.
Cook for 20 minutes, then drain.

Layer and bake

Layer the macaroni in a pudding dish with grated cheese and butter.
Finish with a layer of macaroni without cheese or butter.
Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 1 hour.

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.

Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,962 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

Pipe macaroni: Forms the bulk of the pudding and sets into a tender, sliceable layered structure.
Grated cheese: Adds savoury flavour and richness, and melts to bind the layers together.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and helps the top layer brown in the oven.

“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.