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Buttered Macaroni

A baked macaroni dish with butter, cheese, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Buttered Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in salted water for about 10 minutes, then drain well.

  2. In a warmed pie dish, add the butter and the drained macaroni.

Assemble and bake

  1. Mix the macaroni and butter together, then add the freshly grated cheese and dried breadcrumbs.

  2. Place the dish in a 400°F (200°C) oven and cook until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve directly from the dish.

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).

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 gives it a soft, starchy body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coats the pasta and helps the top brown.
Freshly grated cheese
Adds savoury flavour and melts into the pasta, browning on the surface.
Dried breadcrumbs
Absorb fat and form a crisp, golden crust on top.

The step that matters

Drain the macaroni well. Water left on the cooked pasta dilutes the butter and stops it coating the noodles, so the cheese and crumbs won't cling and the top won't crisp properly.

“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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