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Eggs and Macaroni

A baked layered dish of macaroni, egg yolks, and a thickened milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Eggs and Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break macaroni into 1-inch pieces and cook in boiling water until tender.

  2. Boil the yolks of the eggs until mealy.

Layer and make the sauce

  1. Drain the macaroni and layer it loosely in an earthen pudding dish.

  2. Slice the cooked egg yolks and spread a layer over the macaroni.

  3. Continue layering with macaroni and egg, finishing with a top layer of macaroni.

  4. In a saucepan, heat the milk to boiling, add salt and flour mixed with cold milk, and cook until thickened.

  5. Pour the cream sauce over the layered macaroni and eggs.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until the top is set 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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 and structure of the dish, holding the layers together.
Egg yolks
Enrich the dish and help it set firmly when baked, adding richness and body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, providing moisture and a creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a cream sauce that binds the dish together.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream sauce. Flour must be smoothed in cold milk before adding to boiling milk, otherwise it clumps. Cooking until thickened lets the starch swell fully so the sauce coats the layers evenly.

“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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