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Maccaroni with Garlic and Anchovies

A simple pasta dish of macaroni tossed with garlic, shallot, anchovies, olives, and salad oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,665 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Maccaroni with Garlic and Anchovies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine minced garlic, shallot, anchovies, olives, and salad oil in a small saucepan.

  2. Boil the mixture until the garlic and shallot begin to brown.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the hot-boiled macaroni and stir well.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Garlic + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + shallottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Shallot + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,659 recipes

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

  5. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic
Browns in the hot oil to add a deep, aromatic flavour to the sauce.
Anchovies
Dissolve into the oil to add a salty, savoury depth to the sauce.
Salad oil
Carries the flavours of the aromatics and coats the macaroni with fat.
Macaroni (in the method)
Forms the base that the hot, oily sauce clings to and is spread through.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until the garlic and shallot begin to brown. Garlic and shallot turn bitter if they darken too far, while barely cooked ones taste raw and sharp. Stop as soon as they just start to colour, because they keep cooking in the hot oil.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, shallot, olive):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, shallot, olive. 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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