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Bacon with Macaroni

A simple dish of macaroni cooked in stock with boiled bacon and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Bacon with Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Combine macaroni and stock in a saucepan.

  2. Simmer gently on low heat for about 1 hour until tender, avoiding overcooking.

Finish and serve

  1. Add bacon and butter to the pan.

  2. Toss the pan over the heat for a few moments, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  3. Serve immediately while hot.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni
Forms the body of the dish, becoming tender as it simmers in the stock.
Stock
Cooks the pasta and supplies the savoury liquid that flavours it.
Streaky bacon
Adds salty, smoky meaty flavour and a contrasting chewy texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy coating to the pasta.

The step that matters

Avoid overcooking the macaroni. Pasta keeps softening after it is tender, so it can turn mushy and lose its bite. Simmering gently and checking for tenderness helps keep the texture firm.

“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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