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Creamed Macaroni with Cheese

A creamy macaroni dish made with cheese, milk, butter, flour, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Creamed Macaroni with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into 1‑inch pieces and drop into boiling salted water.

  2. Boil for about 1 hour until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk.

  2. In a separate bowl, rub together the butter and flour, then add to the boiling milk and stir for 2 minutes.

  3. Add ½ teaspoon salt and a pinch of cayenne to the sauce.

Combine and finish

  1. Drain the cooked macaroni and add it to the cream sauce.

  2. Stir in the grated cheese until melted.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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 and body of the dish, holding the sauce.
Cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding richness, savoury flavour and a creamy texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the thickened sauce is made from, giving creaminess.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the flour blend smoothly into the milk.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as its starch swells when heated.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour to the milk. The flour must be fully blended and stirred while the milk is hot so it thickens evenly without lumps. Stirring for the full two minutes cooks out the raw flour taste and lets the starch swell 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.

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