Skip to main content
Main

Timball of Macaroni

A baked pasta dish of macaroni mixed with eggs, butter, bacon, and sweetbread ragout, served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Timball of Macaroni

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil macaroni in milk and water until tender.

  2. Dry the macaroni with a cloth.

  3. Line a mold with slices of fat bacon.

Assemble

  1. Mix beaten eggs with macaroni, adding pepper and salt.

  2. Place some macaroni in the mold, add a ragout of sweetbreads in the middle, and fill with remaining macaroni.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake or boil for 2 hours in a pan of water, ensuring it doesn't boil in the water.

  2. Serve with white or brown sauce and remove the bacon.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Milk + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together26,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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 timballo and sets into a firm, sliceable body.
Eggs
Bind the macaroni and milk together so the timballo holds its shape when cooked.
Milk
Cooks the pasta gently and adds moisture and richness to the body.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Gentle cooking in a water bath. Cooking the mold in water that must not boil keeps the egg custard set but tender. Boiling water would make the eggs curdle and the texture grainy.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes