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Macaroni with Brown Sauce

A macaroni dish cooked in a brown sauce made from butter, flour, stock, and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cheese and butter 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 with Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into 2-inch pieces.

  2. Boil the stock or water.

  3. Add the macaroni to the boiling liquid and cook for 30 minutes.

  4. Drain the macaroni in a colander, saving the liquid.

Make the brown sauce

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter or drippings and mix in the flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add ½ pint of the reserved stock or water, stirring until it boils.

Combine and serve

  1. Stir in the cheese, then add the macaroni and let it boil once.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cheese + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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 of the dish and absorbs the sauce as it cooks.
Butter or drippings
Provides fat for cooking the flour and adds richness and flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with fat and liquid.
Cheese
Adds savoury flavour and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the stock to the flour and fat. Adding liquid gradually while stirring keeps the flour smooth and lump-free. Adding it all at once can trap clumps of starch that stay raw and grainy, so the sauce thickens unevenly.

“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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