Name: Macaroni Savoury
Ingredients: 8 ounces macaroni; 1 small onion, thinly sliced; 2 cloves garlic, minced; 3 ounces butter; 24 cloves; 1 cup tomato pulp; grated rind of ½ lemon; Nepal pepper to taste; salt to taste

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Macaroni Savoury

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

In a pan, melt the butter and fry the onion and garlic until pale yellow.
Add the tomato pulp and grated lemon rind to the pan, stirring well.
Season with Nepal pepper and salt to taste.

Cook and serve

Boil the macaroni in salted water until tender, then drain and set aside.
Combine the cooked macaroni with the sauce 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.

Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together29,058 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,076 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 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

Macaroni: Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce.
Butter: Adds richness and carries the flavour of the fried onion and garlic.
Onion: Sweetens and builds savoury depth when fried gently until pale.
Tomato pulp: Provides the body, moisture and acidity of the sauce.
Garlic: Adds aroma and pungency that mellow during frying.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, garlic, butter, tomato, lemon, pepper):

Thymefits better
Parsleyfits better
Corianderfits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, butter, tomato, lemon, pepper. 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.