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Macaroni and Its Cookery

A macaroni dish prepared with a brown roux, tomato sauce, and optional vegetables, simmered and served with Parmesan cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and turnip match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macaroni and Its Cookery

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Make a brown roux by stirring butter and flour over heat until light brown.

  2. Add boiling water, salt, and pepper to the roux.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. For tomato sauce, stew tomatoes and rub through a colander, mixing with white or brown sauce.

  2. For elaborate tomato sauce, simmer tomatoes with carrot, turnip, onion or garlic, bay leaf, peppercorns, cloves, celery, sweet herb, parsley, and roux until tender.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve with a potato masher.

  4. If too thick, thin with broth or water and season to taste.

Serve with macaroni

  1. For farmer's dish, boil macaroni and heat with fried onions in oil or drippings.

  2. For Palermo macaroni, boil spaghetti, then simmer with brown and tomato sauce and grated Parmesan for 30 minutes.

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. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour to form the roux, adding richness and a toasty flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as the roux cooks, giving body to the tomato base.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavor of the tomato sauce.
White or brown sauce
Adds body and smoothness to the tomato sauce.
Spaghetti
Forms the pasta base that the sauce coats.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and helps the sauce cling to the pasta.

The step that matters

Brown the roux until light brown. Cooking the flour and butter until light brown cooks out raw starch taste and builds nutty flavor, while stirring prevents scorching and lumps that would ruin the sauce's texture.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, sauce, carrot, turnip, onion):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, sauce, carrot, turnip, onion. 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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