Skip to main content
Main

Macaroni with Bechamel Sauce

Macaroni served with a creamy bechamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 Bechamel Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA very hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat, then stir in the flour to make a roux.

  2. Gradually add the boiling milk to the roux, stirring constantly until thickened.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the macaroni according to package instructions.

  2. Drain the macaroni and mix it with the sauce.

  3. 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.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 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).

Butter and flour 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
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and forms the fat base of the roux.
Milk
Liquid that, thickened with the roux, becomes the smooth sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter to form a roux.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to the roux. Adding cold or fast-poured milk can clump the flour into lumps. Adding the milk gradually while stirring constantly lets the starch disperse evenly and thicken into a smooth sauce.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes