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Macaroni Al Napolitano

A pasta dish of macaroni cooked in sweetbread stock with butter, parsley, onion, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper 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 Al Napolitano

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbread

  1. Soak and wash the sweetbread.

  2. Boil the sweetbread covered with water.

  3. Remove from heat, cool, and trim away all fat and skin.

  4. Put the sweetbread back in a clean saucepan with 1 pint of water and the onion.

  5. Cook gently for one hour.

  6. Remove the onion.

  7. Chop the sweetbread into small pieces.

Cook and serve the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into pieces about one inch long.

  2. Wash the macaroni.

  3. Boil the macaroni in the sweetbread cooking water for twenty minutes.

  4. Add the butter, parsley, pepper, salt, and chopped sweetbread to the macaroni.

  5. Cover closely and let it sit for five minutes before serving hot.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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 dish, absorbing flavour from the cooking water and giving it body.
Sweetbread
Provides the rich, tender meat that gives the dish its main texture and flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the pasta and carrying flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, butter, pepper):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter, pepper. 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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