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Cheese and Macaroni Balls

Cheese and macaroni balls are fried balls made from cooked macaroni, cheese, flour, milk, butter, egg, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Cheese and Macaroni Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the macaroni base

  1. Cook the macaroni in boiling salted water until soft, about 30 minutes, then drain and chop it.

  2. Melt the butter in a pan, add the flour, and gradually stir in the milk. Cook for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the chopped macaroni, grated cheese, and seasonings to the mixture, then spread it on a plate to cool.

Shape and fry

  1. Once cooled, shape the mixture into small balls, dip them in beaten egg, and coat with breadcrumbs.

  2. Fry the balls in hot dripping or oil until golden brown and 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. 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. Cheese + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,426 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 balls and gives them a soft, starchy body.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a sauce that binds the mixture together.
Grated cheese
Adds rich flavour and helps bind the mixture as it cools and firms.
Egg
Acts as a binder and coating that helps the breadcrumbs stick to the balls.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried.

The step that matters

Cool the mixture before shaping. Shaping while the mixture is still warm and soft makes it sticky and hard to handle. Cooling lets the starch in the sauce set so the balls hold their shape through the egg and breadcrumb coating and frying.

“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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