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Macaroni and Tomatoes

A simple pasta dish of macaroni simmered in a tomato sauce made with butter, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Macaroni and Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the macaroni

  1. Break the macaroni into short lengths.

  2. Put it into rapidly boiling salted water and cook until tender.

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Prepare 1 pint of tomato puree by passing the tomatoes through a fine sieve.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour, and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Stir in the tomato puree, a good pinch of sugar, and season to taste.

  4. Let it boil for a few minutes, then add the macaroni.

  5. When thoroughly hot, turn onto a dish and serve.

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. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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 dish and provides the starchy body of the meal.
Tomatoes
Supply the main flavour, acidity and moisture of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce and carries flavour.
Flour
Cooked with the butter to form a roux that thickens the tomato sauce.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of the tomatoes with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux. Flour must cook in the melted butter for a few minutes to lose its raw taste and to thicken the sauce evenly. Adding the tomato puree before this cooking is done can leave lumps and a floury flavour.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, 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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