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Sauce for Macaroni

A slow‑cooked beef sauce with lard, claret, tomatoes, vegetables, and herbs, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sauce for Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the sauce

  1. Brown the beef in hot lard.

  2. Add claret, tomatoes, carrot, onion, bay leaf, rosemary, mushrooms, garlic, allspice, and water.

  3. Cook slowly for 6 hours.

Finish the sauce

  1. Strain the sauce and thicken with blended butter and flour.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Rosemary + clovetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together519 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Rosemary + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef
Provides the main body and meaty flavour as it cooks slowly in the sauce.
Lard
Conducts heat for browning the beef and carries fat-soluble flavour into the sauce.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and savoury depth that balances the richness of the meat.
Flour
Thickens the strained sauce so it coats the macaroni.
Butter
Adds fat and smoothness, blended with flour to thicken the sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the beef in hot lard. Browning creates Maillard reactions that build deep, savoury flavour. Meat that is crowded or not hot enough steams instead, leaving the sauce flat and greyish.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, tomato, carrot, onion, rosemary, mushroom, garlic):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Oreganofits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, tomato, carrot, onion, rosemary, mushroom, garlic. 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.

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