Name: Macaroni Soup
Ingredients: ½ pound small pipe macaroni; rich beef or other soup; pepper; salt

Why it works: Beef and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,971 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

½ pound small pipe macaroni
rich beef or other soup
pepper
salt

Directions

Boil macaroni in clear water until tender.
Drain and cut macaroni into 1-inch pieces.
Add macaroni to the soup and boil for 15 minutes.
Serve 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.

Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni: Starch that absorbs broth and adds body and chewiness to the soup.
Rich beef or other soup: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the dish.

“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.