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Italian Spaghetti

A simple pasta dish of spaghetti tossed in a butter, onion, garlic, tomato paste sauce and topped with grated cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Italian Spaghetti

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Mince the onion and fry it in butter until brown.

  2. Add the diluted tomato paste and cook for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the finely minced garlic and cook for another 2 minutes.

  4. Stir in 1 large spoon of grated cheese per person, saving the rest for serving.

Cook and serve

  1. Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti in boiling water until al dente.

  2. Strain the spaghetti carefully and mix it with the sauce.

  3. Serve hot, sprinkling individual helpings with the remaining cheese.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Garlic + romano cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + romano cheesetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Spaghetti
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce on its surface.
Butter
Fat that carries the onion flavor and browns the onion for richness.
Onion
Sweetens and builds the savory base when browned in butter.
Tomato paste
Concentrates tomato flavor and acidity, thickening the sauce as it cooks.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that mellows as it cooks briefly in the sauce.
Parmigiano or romano cheese
Adds salty, savory depth and helps bind the sauce to the pasta.

The step that matters

Frying the onion in butter until brown. Browning develops sweet, deep flavors through the Maillard reaction. Pale onions leave the sauce tasting flat, while over-darkened onions turn bitter.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, butter, onion, romano cheese):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, butter, onion, romano cheese. 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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