Name: Plain Boiled Macaroni
Ingredients: 2 quarts boiling water; 1 tablespoon salt; 12 sticks macaroni; salt to taste; pepper to taste; butter to taste

Why it works: Pepper and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Plain Boiled Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Break and wash the macaroni.
Add the macaroni to the boiling water with salt.
Boil rapidly for 25 minutes.
Pour off the water.
Season with salt, pepper, and butter, then 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.

Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni: Its starch cooks into a tender, firm texture as it boils in water.
Butter: Adds fat and richness that coats the cooked pasta and carries flavour.

“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.