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Macaroni

A simple macaroni dish with Parmesan cheese, butter, and optional broth or mace, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Parmesan cheese and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,163 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the macaroni in water for 20-25 minutes until tender, or longer in broth.

  2. Drain the macaroni and place it in a dish.

  3. Layer the grated Parmesan cheese and butter over the macaroni.

  4. Serve hot, optionally with mustard or beef gravy for added flavor.

  5. For browning, simmer the macaroni in broth with pounded mace and salt before serving.

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. Parmesan cheese + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Butter + macetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Parmesan cheese + macetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together91 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

Butter and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 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, giving it its body and chewy texture when cooked until tender.
Parmesan cheese
Melts into the hot pasta, adding savoury, salty flavour and a rich coating.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel that helps the cheese coat the pasta.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parmesan cheese, butter):

  1. Pepperfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parmesan cheese, butter. 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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