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Macaroni Pie

A baked macaroni and cheese dish with a pie crust topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Macaroni Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Boil the macaroni in salted water until quite soft.

  2. Pour off the water and add the milk, cheese, butter, mustard, salt, cayenne, and white pepper.

  3. Let it boil for 1 minute.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a dish lined with pie crust.

  2. Brush the crust with egg white to keep it dry.

  3. Bake until golden brown.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Milk + cheesetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  5. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 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 pie, softening in water so it holds the filling.
Milk
Provides liquid that combines with the cheese into a creamy sauce.
Cheese
Melts into the sauce, adding richness and savoury flavour.
Butter
Adds fat for smooth texture and rich flavour in the filling.
Egg white
Brushed on the crust, it helps seal moisture out and promotes browning.

The step that matters

Let it boil for 1 minute. Boiling the milk and cheese mixture briefly thickens the sauce and cooks the starch, so the filling sets rather than staying runny in the crust.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cheese, butter, mustard, pepper, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cheese, butter, mustard, pepper, egg. 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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