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How to Boil and Dress Macaroni

A simple boiled macaroni dish flavored with butter, cheese, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cheese are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,962 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

How to Boil and Dress Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring 2 quarts of water to a boil in an iron pot or stew-pan.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of salt and 1 ounce of butter.

  3. Stir in 1 pound of macaroni and boil until tender but firm to the touch.

  4. Drain the macaroni in a colander and return it to the pan.

  5. Add 4 ounces of cheese, a little butter, and salt and pepper to taste.

  6. Toss everything together and serve.

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 + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

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

  3. 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 bulk of the dish and provides the starchy body the sauce clings to.
Cheese
Melts into the warm pasta to add richness, flavor and a creamy coating.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the coated pasta.

The step that matters

Drain the macaroni in a colander and return it to the pan. Pasta that is not drained well leaves excess water that thins the cheese and butter, so the coating turns watery instead of creamy.

“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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