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Macaroni with Egg Sauce

A macaroni dish topped with a sauce made from nut milk, flour, egg yolk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Macaroni with Egg Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Cook the macaroni according to package instructions; drain.

Make the egg sauce

  1. Heat nut milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Dissolve flour in a little cold water, then add egg yolk and salt; beat well.

  3. Stir the mixture into the gently boiling nut milk.

Combine and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the macaroni, mix, and serve hot.

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 + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce as it heats and gives it a rich, smooth body.
White flour
Starch that thickens the liquid and helps keep the sauce from being runny.
Nut milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the thickeners set into.
Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish, carrying the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the gently boiling nut milk. Egg yolk can scramble if it meets very hot liquid too quickly or is boiled hard. Adding it to gently boiling milk while stirring keeps the sauce smooth and lets the flour thicken it evenly.

“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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