Name: Vermicelli, or Macaroni Soup
Ingredients: 1 quart beef tea; 1 ounce vermicelli or 2 ounces macaroni; salt to taste; optional: rice

Why it works: Tea and rice work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 197 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Vermicelli, or Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

1 quart beef tea
1 ounce vermicelli or 2 ounces macaroni
salt to taste
optional: rice

Directions

Boil down 1 quart of beef tea to one-third its volume.
Add vermicelli or macaroni, previously boiled in water, and boil down to 1 pint.
Season with salt to taste.
If using rice, prepare it by boiling and slightly drying before adding it to the concentrated soup.

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.

Tea + ricetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together197 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Beef + ricetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,265 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Beef + teatop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together417 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methyl-3-(methyldithio)furan (thiamin, meat).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef tea: Forms the savoury liquid base, concentrated by boiling to build flavour.
Vermicelli or macaroni: Adds body and substance as the pasta softens in the broth.

“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.