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Boiled Macaroni

Boiled macaroni served with a tomato and herb sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Boiled Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Wipe the macaroni and break it into convenient lengths.

  2. Put the macaroni into a pot of boiling salt water and boil for 15-20 minutes until tender.

  3. For onion flavor, boil 2 onions with the macaroni.

  4. Drain the macaroni and season with butter or dripping.

Make the sauce

  1. To make a sauce, simmer tomatoes, stock, thyme, parsley, cloves, sliced onion, cayenne, and salt for 1 hour.

  2. Drain the sauce and press it through a sieve.

  3. Mix dripping or butter with flour over heat until smooth, then stir into the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the macaroni.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the butter and sauce.
Tomatoes
Provide acidity and body to the sauce's flavor base.
Butter or dripping
Adds fat and richness to the macaroni and the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the fat.
Stock
Adds savory depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour with fat over heat. Cooking flour in fat before adding liquid makes a roux; stirring until smooth prevents lumps and lets the flour thicken the sauce evenly.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, tomato, thyme, parsley, clove, pepper, flour):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, tomato, thyme, parsley, clove, pepper, flour. 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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