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Macaroni with Cream Sauce

A simple macaroni dish simmered in a milk or cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Macaroni with Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil water in a saucepan and add macaroni, cooking for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the macaroni thoroughly and return it to the saucepan.

Make and combine the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix milk or cream with flour and butter until smooth.

  2. Add the milk mixture to the macaroni and simmer for another 20 minutes.

  3. Ensure the sauce covers the macaroni well before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Provides the starchy pasta body that the sauce clings to and is served with.
Milk or cream
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding moisture and richness.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the sauce body.
Butter
Adds fat for smooth texture and rich flavour in the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the sauce with the macaroni. Flour must be cooked in warm liquid long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the sauce. Stirring the mixture smooth before adding it helps prevent lumps, and gentle simmering keeps the milk from scorching or boiling over while it thickens.

“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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