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Macaroni a LA Creme

A macaroni dish topped with a creamy sauce of milk, butter, flour, cream, and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Macaroni a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni in plenty of salted hot water until tender.

  2. Drain the macaroni and place it on a serving dish.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a double boiler, heat the milk until it boils.

  2. Stir in the butter and flour mixture into the boiling milk.

  3. Add the cream, white pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste.

  4. Stir in the grated cheese according to your preference.

Serve

  1. Pour the boiling sauce over the macaroni and serve immediately.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Butter and flour
Form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens as it heats.
Grated cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding richness and savory flavor.
Macaroni
Provides the starchy base that the sauce coats and clings to.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the boiling milk. Flour clumps if added to very hot liquid without being fully blended with the fat first, leaving lumps in the sauce. Stirring steadily while the mixture is hot lets the starch disperse and gelatinize evenly, giving a smooth, thickened sauce.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, cream, pepper, cheese):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, cream, pepper, cheese. 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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