Name: Macaroni Soup
Ingredients: 50 gallons stock; 12½ pounds macaroni; 1½ pounds coarse sea salt; ¼ pound white pepper; ½ pound parsley

Why it works: White pepper and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,451 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

Break the macaroni into small pieces.
Cook the macaroni in salted boiling water for 30 minutes.
Drain and rinse the macaroni in cold water.

Finish the soup

Prepare the soup as you would for barley soup.

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.

White pepper + parsleytop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,451 recipes

Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni: Adds starchy body and bulk, thickening the soup as it releases starch.
Stock: Forms the liquid base and carries the main savoury flavour of the soup.

“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.