Name: Macaroni Soup
Ingredients: 1 cup macaroni, broken into 1-inch pieces; 2 to 4 quarts strained soup or soup stock; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste; 1 sprig parsley, or 1 piece celery, or ½ onion, chopped

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Macaroni Soup

Ingredients

1 cup macaroni, broken into 1-inch pieces
2 to 4 quarts strained soup or soup stock
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
1 sprig parsley, or 1 piece celery, or ½ onion, chopped

Directions

Cook the macaroni

Cook the macaroni in clear water until tender.

Make the soup

Combine the strained soup or soup stock with the cooked macaroni in a pot.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Add the parsley, celery, or chopped onion for flavor.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Macaroni: Provides the starchy pasta pieces that give the soup its body and bite.
Strained soup or soup stock: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavor of the whole soup.

“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.