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Macaroni Spanish

A tomato-based sauce with onions, olives, and peppers served over boiled macaroni.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic 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 ↓

Macaroni Spanish

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the onions in ham, bacon fat, or oil until soft.

  2. Add the tomatoes, parsley, olives, red pepper, and salt to the pan.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the macaroni in salted water with a little garlic until tender, then drain.

  2. Place the drained macaroni on a platter and pour the sauce over it.

  3. Sprinkle with grated cheese before serving.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Olive + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Onions
Soften and sweeten as they cook, forming the base flavour of the sauce.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, moisture and acidity of the sauce.
Macaroni
Forms the starchy base that the sauce coats and clings to.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury richness and a salty, melting finish on top.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, ham, tomato, olive, pepper, garlic, cheese):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Basilfits about as well
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, ham, tomato, olive, pepper, garlic, 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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