Skip to main content
Main

Spanish Spaghetti

A baked spaghetti dish with roasted peppers, tomatoes, onions, and water, garnished with parsley, lettuce, and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spanish Spaghetti

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the peppers

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Roast the peppers in the oven until slightly brown.

  3. Cover the peppers tightly for 5 minutes after removing from the oven.

  4. Remove the seeds and skins from the peppers and chop them finely.

Cook and serve

  1. In a pot, combine the chopped peppers, tomatoes, water, oil, minced onions, and spaghetti.

  2. Boil for 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with finely chopped parsley, garnished with shredded lettuce and watercress.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 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

Peppers
Provide the main body and sweet, mild flavor of the sauce once roasted and chopped.
Tomatoes
Add acidity, moisture and body to the sauce as they cook down.
Spaghetti
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs liquid as it boils in the sauce.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Covering the roasted peppers. Keeping the peppers covered traps steam, which loosens the skins so they peel off easily after roasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, tomato, parsley, lettuce, watercress):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, tomato, parsley, lettuce, watercress. 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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes