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Boiled Macaroni

A boiled macaroni dish served with a smooth butter and flour sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Fill a 3-quart kettle with boiling water and add salt.

  2. Hold the macaroni in a bunch over the kettle, with the ends in the boiling water.

  3. As the macaroni softens, gradually introduce it into the boiling water to preserve its length.

  4. Boil rapidly for 25 minutes until perfectly tender.

  5. Drain the macaroni in a colander.

Make the sauce

  1. In the kettle, add 1 pint of fresh boiling water, salt, and pepper.

  2. Rub together the flour and butter until smooth.

  3. Blend the flour and butter mixture with the boiling water and stir until perfectly smooth.

  4. Add the macaroni to the sauce.

  5. Boil for 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a deep dish.

  2. Serve grated cheese separately, or break the macaroni into convenient lengths if preferred.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Flour and butter 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 becomes tender through boiling.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water into a smooth sauce when blended with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.

The step that matters

Blend the flour and butter mixture with the boiling water. Adding the flour and butter paste to boiling water while stirring disperses the starch evenly. Stirring until smooth prevents lumps, because starch clumps when it hits hot liquid without being separated first.

“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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