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Macaroni a L'italienne

A simple macaroni dish served with melted butter and grated cheese.

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 ↓

Macaroni a L'italienne

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Fill a 3‑quart kettle with boiling water and add 3 teaspoons of salt.

  2. Boil the macaroni for 25 minutes until perfectly tender.

  3. Drain the macaroni thoroughly in a colander.

Serve

  1. Serve the macaroni in a hot dish with plain melted butter and grated cheese on the side.

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
Pasta provides the starchy body of the dish, cooked until tender for a soft bite.
Plain melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the pasta and carrying flavour.
Grated cheese
Adds savoury, salty flavour and a rich texture when melted over the hot pasta.

The step that matters

Boil the macaroni for 25 minutes until perfectly tender. Pasta keeps cooking in its own residual heat after draining, so timing matters. Cooking it fully tender in well-salted boiling water seasons the pasta and gives a soft, even texture throughout.

“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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