Skip to main content
Main

To Dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese

A simple macaroni dish tossed with a creamy Parmesan sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Dress Macaroni with Parmesan Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Make the macaroni

  1. Boil the macaroni until tender, then drain it on a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, combine the cream and butter rolled in flour, then boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Pour onto a plate.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle toasted Parmesan cheese over the macaroni.

  2. Serve on a warm plate to prevent it from cooling too quickly.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Butter + parmesan cheesetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + parmesan cheesetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,566 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Macaroni
Forms the bulk of the dish and carries the sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and helps the flour form a smooth sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream and butter into a sauce that clings to the pasta.
Parmesan cheese
Adds salty, savoury flavour and a nutty aroma when toasted.

The step that matters

Boil the cream and butter-flour mixture for 5 minutes. Flour must be heated long enough to cook out its raw taste and to thicken the cream fully. Too short a boil leaves a pasty, floury sauce that does not coat the macaroni well.

“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.

You might also like

Macaroni and CheeseMacaroni and Cheese102 recipesCheese MakingCheese Making50 recipesCheese FrittersCheese Fritters34 recipesCheese OmeletteCheese Omelette31 recipes